The Boy from the Woods
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4.3 • 114 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A man with a mysterious past must find a missing teenage girl in this shocking thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Run Away.
Thirty years ago, Wilde was found as a boy living feral in the woods, with no memory of his past. Now an adult, he still doesn't know where he comes from, and another child has gone missing.
No one seems to take Naomi Pine's disappearance seriously, not even her father—with one exception. Hester Crimstein, a television criminal attorney, knows through her grandson that Naomi was relentlessly bullied at school. Hester asks Wilde—with whom she shares a tragic connection—to use his unique skills to help find Naomi.
Wilde can't ignore an outcast in trouble, but in order to find Naomi he must venture back into the community where he has never fit in, a place where the powerful are protected even when they harbor secrets that could destroy the lives of millions . . . secrets that Wilde must uncover before it's too late.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With its unlikely duo of heroes, Harlan Coben’s new thriller is not your standard kidnapping whodunit. When two New Jersey high schoolers go missing, 70-year-old truth-bomb-dropping lawyer and TV personality Hester Crimstein and a man of mysterious origins known only as Wilde—who raised himself in the woods from boyhood—team up to work the case. They quickly get tangled in a messy ransom tale involving a reality-star-turned-senator with an eerily familiar penchant for decrying “fake news.” This propulsive mystery reminded us that wealth and power don’t always play nice with ethics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This subpar thriller from Edgar winner Coben (the Myron Bolitar series) pairs an improbable lead with an improbable plot. In 1986, a boy, who looks to be between six and eight years old, is found living on his own in the woods near Westville, N.J. Flash forward 34 years. The boy is now known simply as Wilde, "a beautiful man with his dark sun-kissed complexion, his build of coiled muscles, his forearms looking like high tension wires." Wilde is also a genius and a brilliant PI. His detective skills are called upon after his late best friend's mother, celebrity lawyer Hester Crimstein, learns from her teenage grandson that a bullied classmate of her grandson, Naomi Pine, has disappeared from her Westville home. Naomi's father falsely claims that his daughter went to visit her mother, raising suspicions of foul play. Naomi's story is somehow connected with the presidential aspirations of Sen. Rusty Eggers, a nihilistic tyrant viewed by some on the left as even more of a threat to America than Donald Trump, a hard-to-swallow plotline that Coben does nothing to make feel plausible. This gifted author is capable of better. 7-city author tour.
Customer Reviews
Awful
Total absence of any believable or engaging characters and a ridiculous story to boot. Don't bother with it.