Although I have finished the 2010 audio book challenge I still enjoy walking and listening.

Caught opens with the life of Dan Mercer, social worker and all around good-guy, falling apart. Feeling what turns out to be a justified sense of unease Dan makes his way to an address at which one of the troubled children he counsels is waiting in apparent distress. When he gets there he is instead ambushed by a TV reporter who accuses him of being a paedophile who had gone to the house with the hope of having sex with an underage girl. Ugliness ensues. Concurrently in the same town the McWaid family are dealing with the disappearance of their teenage daughter Hayley. The seemingly happy young girl has been missing for three months and her family are barely coping with the uncertainty her disappearance has caused.

Much of this story is told from the perspective of Wendy Tynes, the news reporter who ambushed Dan Mercer. I found her sanctimonious, hypocritical and obtuse. Did I mention sanctimonious? It was this holier-than-thou aspect of her personality that increasingly grated on my nerves as the book progressed. I should however separate the fact I did not like Wendy from the fact she is a well drawn, complex character. After all it is realistic that I wanted to run over her driving an SUV as I fantasize about doing that to people (and television reporters) in the real world too.

Despite my homicidal feelings for Wendy the characters were the best thing about this book. There were several really credible and quite beautiful depictions of ordinary people in horrible situations. The parents and siblings of Hayley McWaid were all heart-wrenchingly believable. As were the Fathers’ Club: a group of middle-aged men including one of Dan Mercer’s old college roommates who Wendy tracks down with the aim of discovering more about Dan’s past. All of the men had become unemployed thanks to the economic downturn and their various ways of coping with being men unable to provide for their families in a world they believe only values them by their ability to do so was touchingly portrayed. I even managed to find Wendy’s teenage son and father-in-law quite endearing despite their association with the self-righteous Ms Tynes.

Parts of the story were solidly plotted and more akin to traditional crime fiction than a thriller as layers of people’s pasts were unpicked to provide understanding and motivation for various happenings. For me though these portions were overshadowed by some clumsiness. Firstly I began to wonder if Coben had been paid by the Temperance Society (or some shady government body) to wedge the ‘alcohol is bad’ theme in wherever he could (and sometimes where he couldn’t). This was monotonous and a pretty big give away to one of the two major plot threads which meant I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop despite the several apparent endings to that storyline. The other jarring note for me was the inclusion of the use of social media as a plot device. At times this was well integrated but at others it felt overly awkward. I can’t say more without giving away spoilers but, for example, I simply did not believe the actions taken by Wendy’s employers to information they discovered via the blogosphere.

I acknowledge this as a character defect of my own but when I love a particular character I can forgive minor flaws in a book and, conversely, when I develop a slow-burning hatred for someone my brain turns each tiny imperfection of the book into a major distraction. This is, I think, partly to blame for my reaction to Caught but I’ve never claimed to be entirely objective here. If you’d like another perspective on the novel do read the review at Petrona which is untainted by a reviewer’s rampant hatred for the encapsulation of everything that is wrong with the world in the form of Wendy Tynes (though being fair to myself I think I would have found the plot clumsy anyway). This is only the second Harlan Coben book I’ve read and as I really enjoyed the other one I’ll happily give the man another go and I’ll look for more books narrated by Christopher Evan Welch who was excellent.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 2.5/5

Narrator Christopher Evan Welch; Publisher Whole Story Audio Books [2010]; Length 11 hours 3 minutes

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Caught has also been reviewed at Book Journey (which reviews a different narrator’s version of the book), Me, My Book & the Couch (where Shon highly recommends the book) and Petrona (where the ever-reliable Maxine is impressed with the novel too so don’t take my word for it)

I read another of Coben’s standalones, Tell No One, earlier this year and enjoyed it more than this one.

Title: Tell No One

Author: Harlan Coben

Publisher: Orion Books [originally 2000, this edition 2007]

ISBN: 978-1-4091-1702-5

Length: 346 pages

Genre: Thriller

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 3.5/5

One-liner: A frenetically paced, superbly plotted yarn.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Eight years ago David Beck and his wife Elizabeth took their annual trip to the remote place where they had shared their first kiss. That night Beck was beaten and his wife kidnapped. She was found dead several days later, apparently the victim of a serial killer. Beck has since put some semblance of a life back together but it quickly unravels when he starts to receive messages that appear to be from his supposedly dead wife at the same time as two bodies are found in the spot where Elizabeth was kidnapped from. As Beck tries to determine if his wife might be alive after all, the authorities become convinced it was Beck not the serial killer who was responsible for her death and some nefarious characters who seem to know what really happened eight years ago take whatever action is necessary to ensure no one else finds out the truth.

I know it’s an over-used phrase but this book was, for me, a genuine page turner. Sure there are coincidences and plot contrivances to be found but I still read the book as quickly as I physically could, sneaking a few pages whenever I had a spare moment. The original premise hooked me immediately and the story, although far-fetched, sustained its internal logic throughout. There were multiple switches in point of view from first person (Beck’s) to third (virtually everyone else’s at one point or another) which helped give the frantic sense that lots of action was taking place simultaneously.

While the yarn was enjoyable unfortunately the characters were a little too predictable and trite for me to really connect with. Beck is so full of wholesome goodness (he’s a white doctor in a ghetto neighbourhood who never judges anyone not even the pregnant 12-year olds and is still in love with his dead high school sweetheart and is even kind to puppy dogs….) that if I met him in real life I’d want to beat him myself. Almost all of the rest of the characters are stereotypes too: the drug dealer with a heart of gold who helps Beck to go on the run and the evil generic Asian who has seen too much and can kill a man with his bare hands and so on. About the only character who I was really interested in as a person rather than a plot device was Beck’s best friend Shauna the plus size model who “stalks into a room as though it offends her”.

However, in a thriller more than almost any other genre plot is king and I can’t go past the fact that the book kept me interested from the first page to the last.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

For some quite unfathomable reason I’ve never read any of Coben’s other books but based on the writing here I’m keen to try more so if you have a favourite Harlan Coben book or can tell me whether or not I need to start at the beginning of his Myron Bolitar series let me know in the comments below.

This book was supplied to me free by the First Reads program at goodreads.com (how a book that’s been available since 2000 qualifies as ‘first read’ has me baffled but I’m grateful for the book anyway).

Tell No One has been reviewed at Jen’s Book Thoughts and You’ve Gotta Read This,