The Boy From the Woods is Harlan Coben’s latest, and will likely be another very successful thriller. The story has several threads throughout…all related, and all done well. Naomi Pine is a miserable teenager who is mocked and bullied relentlessly by her classmates. She is a complete outcast who dreams of fitting in with the more popular kids. One of those kids, Matthew, is worried when she disappears, and fears he and the popular rich kid Crash (yes, really) bear some responsibility for her disappearance. He asks his grandmother, the awesome criminal defense attorney and TV star Hester Crimstein (who has appeared in several of Coben’s previous books), for help.
Hester’s son David died as a teenager in a car accident, after becoming friends with the aptly named Wilde, who was found as a feral child living in the woods thirty years ago. Their bond resulted in Wilde being sort of a surrogate father to Matthew following David’s death and his own adventures at West Point and working in various special ops positions prior to forming his own detective agency. Wilde also has an on-again, off-again “friends with benefits” relationship with Matthew’s mom Laila, who is a beautiful and brainy African-American attorney.
Wilde relates to Naomi, a fellow outcast, and agrees to help Hester help Matthew help Naomi (still with me? It actually flows fine in the book). Wilde’s search for Naomi takes him back to the town where he grew up, a town that is full of secrets that have been protecting the rich and powerful, including that kid Crash’s parents, Dash (yes, really) and Delia Maynard.
Dash (basically the Mark Burnett character) is a creator of TV shows and characters. One of those characters is Rusty Eggers (the Trump character), “…a talk show guru with a sketchy background”, a “fake entity” now running a “disruptive Presidential campaign,” believing that the system in America is broken, and “…the only way to fix it is to first upend it.” There are a ton of parallels with the current reality we live in, exemplified by Rusty’s reference to Werner Herzog, the German film director who “…said that America was waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of our people will kill one-third of our people while one-third of our people watches.”
The various threads are interwoven successfully at a fairly fast pace, and while there are connections with other of Coben’s stories and characters, this is totally a standalone novel. The Wilde character’s story requires some willing suspension of disbelief, and the twist at the end and the resolution didn’t totally work for me…but I really enjoyed the experience of reading it. Four stars (might have been five with a different ending, but I can’t imagine what that might have been). Thanks to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for this honest review.