If you like the darkly romantic thrillers of Daphne Du Maurier, (Rebecca, The House on the Strand, Jamaica Inn), where secrets from the past surface to tease and torture the protagonists, you should also enjoy Robert Goddard, a best-selling author in his native Britain. Goddard's latest takes the main character of his Into the Blue--idealistic failure Harry Barnett--through a story involving the son he never knew he had, a 33-year-old math genius now in a coma. Harry's stumbling investigations reveal sinister and even surreal overtones to his son's research, and Goddard's silky prose generates an unusual depth of excitement and sympathy. Other Goddard books in paperback include Closed Circle, Hand in Glove, In Pale Battalions, and Painting the Darkness.


From Library Journal
In this above-average thriller by Goddard (A Debt of Dishonour, LJ 12/91), the presumably childless Harry Barnett, living a quiet, aimless life in Britain, receives an anonymous call informing him that his son, a brilliant mathematician, is comatose. Worse, the son's condition is probably not accidental. His notebooks are missing; people around him are dying under mysterious circumstances. Harry, introduced in Goddard's Into the Blue (LJ 1/91), finds a new sense of purpose with the discovery that he is a father, and he begins to investigate what happened and why. The answer lies under layers of deceit, greed, fear, madness, and genius and leads Harry into unexpected byways. By turns scary and intelligent, this novel, lightly grounded in contemporary mathematical theory, will be received well in public libraries.?Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, Kan.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Chivers has done it again. Paul Shelley's masterful reading, along with Robert Goddard's masterful writing, has transformed what might have been an ordinary thriller into the audio equivalent of a page-turner. The hero--if you can call him that--is Harry Barnett, back from Rhodes (INTO THE BLUE, 1990) and seemingly just as shiftless as ever. But is he? When he discovers that a son he never knew he had is hospitalized in a coma, he determines to find out why . . . and how . . . and who. As his quest becomes more and more sinister, Harry's ingenuity and courage become more and more surprising . . . especially to himself. J.C. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
In this sequel to Into the Blue (1991), Londoner Harry Barnett has been trying to pick up the pieces of his life since a scandal scotched his career. Reduced to working at a gas station and drowning his sorrows at the local pub, Harry is shocked to get a phone call informing him that he has a 34-year-old son: one David Venning, a brilliant mathematician who lies comatose in hospital. As Harry discreetly inquires about the circumstances of David's "accident," he finds himself hoping that, somehow, his son will recover, and they can have a relationship. When two of David's colleagues die under equally suspicious circumstances, Harry is drawn into an investigation that takes him from London to Sweden to the U.S. and into a rarefied circle of eggheads. This well-written thriller offers offbeat subject matter and a finely etched portrait of Harry, a tough old bird whose hands are never quite steady but whose mind is lightning quick. Joanne Wilkinson


From Kirkus Reviews
Six years after the mysterious disappearance of Heather Mallender played havoc with his seedy existence (Into the Blue, 1991), Harry Barnett's life is turned upside-down once more by an unexpected discovery--the news that he has a grown son. It's not the happiest of reunions, since David Venning is comatose after an insulin overdose doctors don't expect him to survive, and his mother, Harry's long-ago lover Iris Hewitt, isn't pleased that somebody's tipped Harry off that his son is in the hospital. Floundering around for some way to help David, a brilliant mathematician sure to suffer brain damage even if he recovers, Harry grabs two slender threads: David's consuming interest in hyper-dimensions, which led him to magician Adam Slade, and his firing, together with several colleagues, by Byron Lazenby, president of Globescope, a firm that predicts the future. A talk with Slade leads nowhere, but the Globescope connection ends up leading halfway around the world--via the news that two of the other experts working on Globescope's Project Sybil have lost not only their jobs (Lazenby refused to accept their downbeat forecasts for 2050) but their lives in suspicious accidents. Before you can say, ``beyond the fourth dimension,'' Harry's joined forces with the survivors of Project Sybil, who are sure they can stop the killings if they can just get hold of an incriminating tape-recording David hid inside Lazenby's office during their final meeting. So Harry's agreeable stint of globe- hopping (Copenhagen, the United Nations, a Hudson River asylum, the Cotton Bowl) ends with a tense search for the McGuffin in Globescope's Washington headquarters. It's not giving too much away to say that Harry's adventures among the futurologists, though they begin with a fine flourish of melodrama, don't exactly work out as neatly as he expects. Father and son, cloak and dagger, relativity and quantum mechanics--Goddard (Closed Circle, 1994, etc.) is surely the suavest guide to this unlikely m‚lange of formulas. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Barbara Taylor Bradford
I consider him to be the master of suspense.


Review
"Undoubtedly Goddard's most entertaining book to date"
-The Times

"The plot races from one crisis to the next, keeping you guessing all the time.  And there's a neat twist at the end, too"
-Ideal Home


From the Paperback edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Harry Barnett is shocked to learn that he has a son—David Venning, a brilliant mathematician, now languishing in hospital in a diabetic coma. And this is only the first and smallest of the mysteries he is about to encounter.

David's condition is attributed to an accident or suicide attempt. But Harry discovers that his mathematical notebooks are missing from the hotel room where he was found and two other scientists employed by the same American forecasting institute have died in suspicious circumstances. Driven on by the slim hope of saving the son he never knew he had, Harry goes in search of the truth and finds himself entangled in several different kinds of conspiracy—none of which he ought to stand the slightest chance of defeating.

Harry Barnett was the flawed hero of Robert Goddard's earlier novel, the award-winning Into the Blue. But nothing in that experience prepared him—or the reader—for the baffling conundrums and heart-stopping suspense of Out of the Sun

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Goddard's bestseller status in Britain rests on his ability to tell a suspenseful storyusually one in which dark secrets come to lightin a literate style. His ninth novel revisits Harry Barnett, the ill-starred protagonist of the well-received Into the Blue. Using booze to shut out the pain of personal failure, the ineptly idealistic and ever-chivalrous antihero is stunned back into reality when an anonymous caller informs him that he is the father of David Venning, a 33-year-old mathematical superbrain. Ironically emblematic of the rest of Harry's hapless life, his secret son is hooked up to life support, having slipped into what appears to be an intractable coma after an insulin overdose. But subsequent discoveries leave Harry suspicious: David's closely guarded notebooks are missing, and two of his former colleagues at Globescope, a powerful corporation engaged in worldwide socioeconomic forecasts, have recently died under questionable circumstances. Desperate to save his son, Harry embarks on a quest to find David's ex-lover, a brilliant young authorityas it happenson treating coma. The trail leads into a maze of sinister corporate machinations and long-forgotten academic politics suggesting a conspiracy to repress David's startling mathematical calculationswhich may reveal an expanded physical order of the universe. Bittersweet romance is overshadowed by suspicion and murder as Harry is menaced from forces in the world as he knows it and from someplace that has something to do with hyper-dimensionalism. This harrowing odyssey leads from Europe across the U.S. and back to England before Harry uncovers the truth in a heartstopping climactic confrontation. Goddard's considerable skills as a storyteller offset Harry's chronic lapses into tedious exercises of boozy self-recrimination. (June) FYI: Into the Blue is currently being made into a film in the U.K.

Library Journal

In this above-average thriller by Goddard (A Debt of Dishonour, LJ 12/91), the presumably childless Harry Barnett, living a quiet, aimless life in Britain, receives an anonymous call informing him that his son, a brilliant mathematician, is comatose. Worse, the son's condition is probably not accidental. His notebooks are missing; people around him are dying under mysterious circumstances. Harry, introduced in Goddard's Into the Blue (LJ 1/91), finds a new sense of purpose with the discovery that he is a father, and he begins to investigate what happened and why. The answer lies under layers of deceit, greed, fear, madness, and genius and leads Harry into unexpected byways. By turns scary and intelligent, this novel, lightly grounded in contemporary mathematical theory, will be received well in public libraries.Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Kirkus Reviews

Six years after the mysterious disappearance of Heather Mallender played havoc with his seedy existence (Into the Blue, 1991), Harry Barnett's life is turned upside-down once more by an unexpected discovery—the news that he has a grown son.

It's not the happiest of reunions, since David Venning is comatose after an insulin overdose doctors don't expect him to survive, and his mother, Harry's long-ago lover Iris Hewitt, isn't pleased that somebody's tipped Harry off that his son is in the hospital. Floundering around for some way to help David, a brilliant mathematician sure to suffer brain damage even if he recovers, Harry grabs two slender threads: David's consuming interest in hyper-dimensions, which led him to magician Adam Slade, and his firing, together with several colleagues, by Byron Lazenby, president of Globescope, a firm that predicts the future. A talk with Slade leads nowhere, but the Globescope connection ends up leading halfway around the world—via the news that two of the other experts working on Globescope's Project Sybil have lost not only their jobs (Lazenby refused to accept their downbeat forecasts for 2050) but their lives in suspicious accidents. Before you can say, "beyond the fourth dimension," Harry's joined forces with the survivors of Project Sybil, who are sure they can stop the killings if they can just get hold of an incriminating tape-recording David hid inside Lazenby's office during their final meeting. So Harry's agreeable stint of globe- hopping (Copenhagen, the United Nations, a Hudson River asylum, the Cotton Bowl) ends with a tense search for the McGuffin in Globescope's Washington headquarters. It's not giving too much away to say that Harry's adventures among the futurologists, though they begin with a fine flourish of melodrama, don't exactly work out as neatly as he expects.

Father and son, cloak and dagger, relativity and quantum mechanics—Goddard (Closed Circle, 1994, etc.) is surely the suavest guide to this unlikely mélange of formulas.