The Last Goodbye: The heart-pounding new thriller from the bestselling author of The Blackbird

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But as Raker digs deeper, he starts to unravel an elaborate history of lies binding the cases together. Thanks to NetGalley and Michael Jospeh Penguin Random House for the opportunity to preview this excellent read in exchange for my honest review and congratulations to Tim Weaver, another triumph! Over the years Rebekah has received condolence cards claiming to be from Fiona on the passing of her father and brothers.

Unsurprisingly, Tim has written another blinder and I thoroughly enjoyed ‘The Last Goodbye’…I’m just hoping it’s not a goodbye! Family ties, love and loyalty are threads that also run through Exiles by Jane Harper, which also centres upon the mystery of a mother who vanished without trace.

Weaver deftly introduces an array of characters, their identities often shrouded in secrecy and their names morphing in a dizzying dance of deception. Author Daniel Sweren-Becker must have been well tuned in to the zeitgeist when he conceived Kill Show, his newly published ‘true crime’ novel, as it delves into growing critiques of the genre. Healy is in prison on remand and the jail grapevine is hot with gossip that the ‘former fisherman’ is actually an ex-cop.

Expertly plotted and executed this book, as with the rest in the series, grabs you from the start and doesn’t let you go. In The Last Goodbye, David is hired by Rebekah who's mother upped and left when she was a small child, the other missing case which seems unrelated is a father and son who went into a ghost house and never showed up. I would like to thank both Netgalley and Michael Joseph for supplying a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. The major themes of the story – including the victim, crime scene location, and central character – were crowdsourced on Twitter. The fates of the two men are inextricably linked, although they vehemently deny any previous friendship.When the book ended with a letter from Fiona expressing motherly love (despite her daughter spending decades believing she didn't love her family), I was so bored I skipped it. Missing persons stories are a popular trope in crime fiction, as demonstrated so well by this series which has now reached book 12. The book begins twelve months after her death, centering on the mysterious reappearance of a man thought to have died in a car crash. As the walls start to close in, so does an overweening sense of danger – and when someone offers him a juicy get-out-of-jail card, he is sorely tempted to snatch it with both hands.

Keeping up with these intricacies may prove challenging, but it is a testament to Weaver's skill that he maintains a sense of clarity amidst the complexity. This intriguing twelfth instalment, The Last Goodbye, involves puzzling disappearances separated by nearly forty years. There is also a strand of the plot which relates to David’s friend Healy, now in prison for faking his own death. One can sense Weaver's meticulous planning as the puzzle pieces fall into place, leaving readers both satisfied and in awe. There are two timelines in this book, from 1985 to current day, providing the back story connecting gradually with the current modern investigation, both full of action.If you are familiar with Weaver, then you know just what complex and gritty rabbit holes he creates for Raker to fall into, and just how much the police, particularly Phillips, resent that he solves cases where they fail. Having read all of the previous novels; this maintains the intrigue, suspense and complexity of investigating missing people and it's not necessary to have read the earlier books, but, if you haven't you're in for a treat. But at a certain point, I realized that all of his female characters are completely interchangeable. At the same time, the unwanted reappearance and remand of once-dead policeman Colm Healy may upturn Raker’s own life. It seemed as though Fiona was being placed into the stereotype of how mothers are supposed to act, rather than being allowed to flourish into a flawed, but fascinating, three-dimensional figure.

I finished it with a huge sense of gratitude that it is a series and that it will not be the last I will be meeting the brilliant, driven, astute yet beautifully flawed David Raker. Although this is now the 13th book of the series, Tim Weaver is still very much at the peak of his game. The novel is told from various points of view and not just in the present as there are flashbacks to 1985 when a man arrives in England for the first time. But one disappearance leads to another that Raker believes is linked and things begin to get very dicey indeed. This is my first read by author Tim Weaver and this is actually book 12 in a series " David Raker", which I did not realise at first.

The last goodbye bye Tim Weaver is book 12 in the David Raker series and like the others in the h series it does not disappoint. There is a large cast of brilliantly created characters and an intricately plotted, dark story, which is relentlessly tense. Would have been 5 stars, but the outrageous coincidences which led to the denouement was a little too much, I thought. My only criticism of The Last Goodbye is that it is an overly long novel that I feel could have been slightly edited. In truth, The Last Goodbye has more threads than the Bayeux Tapestry, and although Tim Weaver lives up to his name by pulling them together into a pleasing picture, the meandering timelines and hopscotching from one narrative to the other are somewhat disconcerting and at times confusing.