23 October 2009 THEY NEVER CAME BACK by Caroline B. Cooney, Delacorte, January 2010, 208p., ISBN: 978-0-385-73808-8; Libr. ISBN: 978-0-385-90709-5
"Hanging in the back, shoulder straps twisted around a wooden hanger, was a small child's backpack. She took it down and held it for a while, as if it were a teddy bear or a blankie. Then she turned on the bedside lamp, and for the first time in years, looked through the contents.
"There was a hoodie, knit from soft fluffy wool, with a small pack of tissues tucked in the front left pocket. There was a paperback she had read many times, her favorite in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series. There was a little snap-top leather change purse with some change. There was an inside zip pocket where once upon a time there had been ten one-hundred-dollar bills.
"She had often puzzled about those bills. What had her parents envisioned? That at age ten she might need to pay for hotel rooms or dinner?
"Her parents had lost home, jobs, country, and daughter all at once.
"Her brilliant excitable energetic parents, stranded with nothing. Well, money. They had money."
Cade and Rory Lyman from Greenwich Connecticut were the high-flying managers of their own investment fund. Through that fund they'd embezzled many millions of dollars before destroying the evidence and plotting their escape through separate flights out of the country. They tell their ten year-old daughter Murielle that the three of them are heading off to a secret vacation in England the following day and that Mommy's sister, Aunt Lois, will pick her up from her piano lesson and drive her down to JFK Airport to meet Daddy for their flight.
But, on the way to the airport, Aunt Lois decides that she can no longer participate in the scheme, so she returns home with Murielle. Murielle's parents leave the country without her and successfully disappear. Because of a federal investigation into Aunt Lois' participation in the escape, Murielle is placed in foster care and her whereabouts are soon lost to the public, to her Aunt Lois and beloved cousin Tommy and -- because of a court order -- lost to the FBI.
Five years later, during lunch at a high-achievers summer school session at Greenwich High, cousin Tommy looks across the cafeteria and sees his cousin Murielle Lyman. Except that when he excitedly makes a big scene in approaching her, it turns out that it is not Murielle, it is Cathy Ferris from Norwalk. Or is it really Murielle after all? Sixty brainy, tech-savvy summer school students are suddenly speculating, texting each other, Googling for information on the five year-old mystery, telling their parents, and contacting the FBI. Amongst those students is the daughter of Cade and Rory Lyman's Greenwich office manager who lost everything and went to prison for two years.
THEY NEVER CAME BACK is a superbly-crafted psychological thriller that alternates between Murielle's life beginning five years ago on the day her parents disappeared, and Cathy Ferris' life amidst the turmoil that follows Tommy's "discovery." That I actually took a break in the middle to get a few hours sleep was only because of the lateness of the hour when I picked it up to begin reading. Caroline Cooney is so impressive in her understanding of and utilization in the plot of Twenty-first century information and social networking technologies. I am in awe of her ability to cover a multitude of details and possibilities in making the story so eerily realistic and plausible.
THEY NEVER CAME BACK has me thinking of the old Nineteenth-century saying, re-popularized in the Sixties, "My country, right or wrong." When it comes down to it, how many of us, no matter what they did and no matter what we think of them privately, would say, "My parents, right or wrong"?
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