Modern crime fiction involves the quest of fully-developed protagonist who struggle to solve a crime which is made more atrocious by it’s connections between family and brutal violence. In the novel No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson modern the protagonist must go through a life changing experience to set the novel. In these novels family plays a major role in who the characters are, their backgrounds allow the reader to understand where they are today. Searching for answers to unanswered questions, trying to find a reason as to why things happen they way they do or why they happen to you, sometimes it is better not knowing. When you finally get the answers you have been searching for they …show more content…
In both these novels the violence and crimes are important they grab the reader’s interest and make them want to keep reading, the reader is intrigued as they follow along the plot. In the novel No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay The protagonist Cynthia goes through a life changing experience, an event experienced by a person altering his/her life or circumstances in a substantial way. Cynthia’s life changing experience is when she wakes up one morning for school and her parents and brother have vanished everyone is gone and there is no evidence as to where they have gone. Cynthia has no idea what happen to her family that night until twenty five years later when she has a family of her own. “The thing that always nagged at me was, why'd she survive? Assuming of course, that the rest of the family was dead.” ( Barclay, 24) What haunts Cynthia for the rest of her life is why she survived but the rest of her family didn't. This is also a question most of the readers wonder. In the novel