Twenty years ago, four teenagers at summer camp walked into the woods at night. Two were found murdered, and the others were never seen again. Four families had their lives changed forever. Now, two decades later, they are about to change again.
For Paul Copeland, the county prosecutor of Essex, New Jersey, mourning the loss of his sister has only recently begun to subside. Cope, as he is known, is now dealing with raising his six-year-old daughter as a single father after his wife has died of cancer. Balancing family life and a rapidly ascending career as a prosecutor distracts him from his past traumas, but only for so long. When a homicide victim is found with evidence linking him to Cope, the well-buried secrets of the prosecutor's family are threatened.
Is this homicide victim one of the campers who disappeared with his sister? Could his sister be alive? Cope has to confront so much he left behind that summer twenty years ago: his first love, Lucy; his mother, who abandoned the family; and the secrets that his Russian parents might have been hiding even from their own children. Cope must decide what is better left hidden in the dark and what truths can be brought to the light.
I suppose there could be a better reader of this tense, complex, thoroughly entertaining novel than Scott Brick, but it's hard to see how. Let's see, he mispronounces Wilkes Barre (the final "e" is long, not silent), and maybe he overplays the emotion in the scene in which Paul's uncle, a former KGB spy, reveals that the body just found in the woods is not Paul's sister, it's . . . but it would be a shame to spoil a single twist of this double-helix plot. The story's first-person narrator, Paul Copeland, prosecutor of Essex County, New Jersey, is trying a rape case, the defendants' fathers are blackmailing him, and a boy supposedly murdered 20 years ago with Paul's sister turns up mature and freshly dead. Unturnoffable. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Harlan Coben is the bestselling author of fourteen previous novels, including The Woods, Promise Me, and The Innocent, and is the winner of the Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony awards. He lives in New Jersey with his family.
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