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Starred review from January 30, 2012
Edgar-winner Coben (Caught) continues to mine rich veins of terror in his New Jersey novels of domestic suspense, exploring both the reality and the ideal of family ties and the ease with which evil can destroy both. In this masterful stand-alone, three people are haunted by the disappearance of Stewart Green 17 years earlier in Atlantic City: photographer Ray Levine; housewife Megan Pierce; and Detective Broome, who investigated the disappearance and befriended Green’s wife and kids. The disappearance of Carlton Flynn on February 18, the same date Green went missing, helps reignite the smoldering case, pointing the way to other victims and a strange pattern. Flynn’s case also results in a pair of preppie, very scary sadists calling themselves Ken and Barbie entering the scene. Coben writes with wit and irony, and his flair for exposing the frail balance point between order and chaos in our lives has never been stronger than in this suspenseful outing. 5-city author tour. Agent: Lisa Erbach Vance, Aaron Priest Literary Agency.

February 15, 2012
The past comes knocking for a former stripper who thought she'd said goodbye to all that in an altogether less-successful distaff reworking of The Innocent (2005). In some ways, the life Megan Pierce left behind when she stopped giving lap dances and calling herself Cassie was perfect: exciting, glamorous and anything but routine. If only her abusive client Stewart Green hadn't vanished under circumstances that strongly suggested a violent end, Megan would never have taken a powder, ultimately trading Atlantic City's La Creme nightclub for the American dream with a lawyer husband, two perfect children and every appliance of the upscale suburban lifestyle. One day, however, Megan--motivated solely, it seems, by the need to kick-start the plot--decides to drop in at La Creme. Her sudden reappearance, together with her old colleague Lorraine Griggs' sighting of somebody who looks a lot like Stewart and the remarkably similar disappearance exactly 17 years later of construction heir Carlton Flynn, sets in motion a new chain of violence and threatens to reveal all of Megan's carefully hidden secrets. Eventually she reconnects with her old flame Ray Levine, a photographer who has hit the skids big time, and tells what she knows to Det. Broome of Atlantic City Homicide. But both men's most protective instincts are challenged by a pair of wholesome killers calling themselves Barbie and Ken--and by the fact that Broome's own boss is working against him.A proficient but routine thriller in which you can tell for miles in advance who's disposable and who's slated for survival, marked by the virtual absence of the baroque plot twists fans of Coben (Live Wire, 2011, etc.) expect as their due.

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Starred review from February 1, 2012
Coben's title describes perfectly how the suspense in this tour-de-force stand-alone works. It stays close in an unbelievably sustained way, giving the reader a steady steam of jolts and sinking feelings, as Coben's three main characters face danger from without and from their own tricky psyches. These three characters are mired in the past. They all got stuck there when a family man with a secret life went missing 17 years ago. Ray is a former AP photojournalist who has become a drunk and a professional bottom-feeder as a photographer for a service that hires fake paparazzi. Coben's descriptions of Ray's work (especially for the poor slob who hires him on a succession of first dates) is side-splittingly funny. The second character seems to be doing greatMegan is a wealthy, tennis-playing, SUV-driving suburban mombut she yearns for her former life as an exotic dancer. And Broome is a detective who became too involved with the family of the missing man and can't shake the case. When another local man disappears, Broome intensifies the investigation, discovering that 14 men have vanished on Mardi Gras over the last 17 years. Coben excels in descriptions of his characters' tortured, ruminative inner lives. He also can pull out of their psychological nosedives to deliver some of the most shocking action scenes in current crime fiction. Once again, Coben uses the dives of Atlantic City as a backdrop, and what he does with the six-story pink construction known as Lucy the Elephant is worthy of Hitchcock. Satisfying on every level. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Coben's stand-alone thrillers are as close as one can come in publishing to sure-thing best-sellers, even without the full-court marketing press this one will have behind it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)