Book #32 - Caught

The new Harlen Coben novel, Caught, once again set in New Jersey, but not a Myron Bolitor novel. However Win makes a surprise appearance, which was exciting for me. Like Hawk in the Spenser novels, he adds spice to the stories.

In this one, a young girl at a high school disappears. She just vanishes one day, not coming home at night and her parents realize in the morning she’s gone. They’re devastated, but then they’re just a small part of the rest of the story.

We open with a young coach, a good man that enjoys working with kids. He’s gotten a call for help from a young woman, and is going to a house at night, after coaching a basketball game, to see what he can do. It’s a classic mistake, like the next victim in a horror movie walking down a dark hallway. You know it’s the wrong thing to do, Coben writes with a sense of forebodind, and you can feel it. He arrives, enters, and …

is ambushed by a reporter. A young rising woman that does exposes on TV. She’s been searching out child molsters/porngraphers, and she captures the young coach on film, supposedly going to meet with an underage girl for an affair. He runs out, and the book jumps.

It’s months later, the girl still missing, the coach now on trial, but it’s the testimony of the reporter, who entered the coach’s house, that is the center of attention. Her illegal entry is portrayed as part of the DA’s case, and charges are dismissed. She is the real center of the story as she tries to uncover what really happened. The coach proclaims his innocence, and the reporter starts to wonder if she made a mistake.

The novel is like other Coben’s, thought a little darker. We follow the reporter through her investigations, her firing, her attempts to track down others that can help her understand. As she goes through the book, there are twists and turns, Coben making us think that it’s one character after another that’s responsible for the missing girl, or the frame up of the coach.

And like most Coben’s, there’s a twist at the end, bringing the story to a startling conclusion. It was a fun read, one that I had trouble putting down.