Review: Caught by Harlan Coben

Caught is a quick read. It grabbed my attention in the prologue and kept me reading. That's not to say it was a great book, but it never let up. There was twist after turn and a batch of characters to keep track of. Wendy Tynes is a reporter who tracks down sexual predators, sets up sting operations, and exposes them on national television. Dan Mercer is the latest pedophile who she catches. He gets off on a technicality, helped by a flamboyant lawyer who only makes one appearance in the book, but Dan's life is essentially ruined. Wendy starts to wonder if he was ever actually guilty, though. Meanwhile, a teenage girl in the neighborhood, pretty, talented, a good girl, has been missing for months and the police have exhausted all their leads. In addition to the missing, potentially kidnapped girl and a falsely accused man, there's a murder, a vigilante, an embezzlement scheme, a group of unemployed middle-aged men, four...
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The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, translated by Alexander O. Smith All I can say is read this one, but read it all the way through. It's the end that makes it outstanding. Set in Tokyo, the book starts out with a woman, Yasuko, killing her ex-husband to protect her daughter, so we know who the killer is, who was killed and why. Her neighbor, Ishigami, a brilliant mathematician, decides to help her cover up the murder, so we know who her accomplice is but not why he goes to such extremes to protect her. I have to protect them, thought Ishigami. He would never be this close to so beautiful a woman ever again in his life. He was sure of that. He had to summon every last bit of his strength and knowlege to prevent any calamity from happening to her. (pg. 36, ARC) Enter the detectives, a pair of good guys trying to figure out what happened. If it...
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Death by Scrabble by Charlie Fish

"Death by Scrabble" by Charlie Fish I love boardgames, that's no secret. So when I ran across this short story over at East of the Web, I had to read it. I'm not going to say it's a work of literary genius but it definitely made me laugh. I do love a quirky sense of humor. A couple is playing Scrabble on a hot, sticky day. The man is miserable. He hates his wife. He's sure that if she were dead he would be doing something better than playing a stupid game of scrabble, a game he's pretty sure he's not even going to win. If she wasn't around, I'd be doing something interesting right now. I'd be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. I'd be starring in the latest Hollywood blockbuster. I'd be sailing the Vendee Globe on a 60-foot clipper called the New Horizons - I don't know, but I'd be doing something. He begins thinking of words like murder, kill,...
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The Chatham School Affair by Thomas H. Cook

The Chatham School Affair by Thomas H. Cook Henry Griswald is the narrator of this tragic story he relates what happened seven decades earlier, when in 1926, he was a teenager, son of the headmaster of the Chatham School. That is the year, Elizabeth Channing arrived in town, a young, beautiful art teacher who has traveled the world.  That is the year his small town witnessed passion and death, saw a young woman destroyed and eventually accused of murder. Only Henry holds the key to what truly happened those years ago and it takes the whole book to learn all of the secrets. We left a few minutes later, and I didn't say a single word to Miss Channing that morning, but only gazed at her stonily, my demeanor already forming into the hard shell it would assume on the day I testified against her, answering every question with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, knowing all the...
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Would they know what’s important to me?

Hopefully, I'll have my review up for 13 1/2 by Nevada Barr later this week, but I did want to share this tidbit with you.  Polly was not given to the accumulation of worldly goods, but, had anyone gone through her house, they would have seen pictures of children and friends, letters from students, invitation accepted and declined, calendars marked with upcoming events, hand-drawn birthday cards, inscribed book, awards, diplomas, notes on bulletin boards—a short history of Polly Marchand in three dimensions. (pg. 237) Polly is contrasting her house with another woman's apartment. In Red's plethora of objects nothing that spoke of her heart had surfaced, only evidence of compulsion, addiction, and depression. But for the cigar box, there was no indication that anyone had touched her life—or that she had touched the life of another. (pg. 237) It made me wonder what a stranger would think if they went through my house. Would they know who and what were important to me? I...
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Hold Tight by Harlan Coben

Hold Tight by Harlan Coben Tia and Mike Baye never imagined they'd spy on their kids. But their sixteen-year-old son Adam has been unusually distant lately, and after the suicide of his best friend Spencer Hill, they can't help but worry. Within days of installing a sophisticated spy program on Adam's computer, they are jolted by a cryptic message from an unknown correspondent that shakes them to their core "just stay quiet and all safe." As if Mike Baye isn't dealing with enough, he also learns that Lucas Loriman, the sweet kid who grew up next door, is in urgent need of a kidney transplant. As the boy's doctor, Mike suddenly finds himself in possession of an explosive secret that threatens to rip the Loriman family apart at the seams. Nearby, while browsing through an online memorial for Spencer, Betsy Hill discovers a surprising detail about the night of her son's death. Before she can find out more, Adam disappears, taking the truth with...
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