The Woods
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | The Woods |
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| Author: | Harlan Coben |
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| Publisher: | Orion |
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.
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Reviews
Barnes and Noble
While the pulse-pounding action of Harlan Coben’s stand-alone thriller takes place in a familiar (almost cinematic) setting—the ominous woodlands surrounding a summer camp—the plotline of this wild roller-coaster ride is anything but predictable.
In the midst of the biggest case of his career, acting Essex County prosecutor Paul Copeland is contacted by investigators who have linked him to a middle-aged man found dead in Manhattan. When he views the corpse, he is shocked by the man’s uncanny resemblance to Gil Perez, one of four teenagers (including Copeland’s own sister Camille) supposedly killed decades earlier in the woods near a New Jersey summer camp. Working as a camp security guard that summer, Copeland neglected his duties for a tryst with his girlfriend on the night of the murders, and he has lived all these years with crippling guilt and grief. Now he’s forced to revisit that tragic event as he embarks on a quest to unravel the mystery behind the brutal crime.
Coben pulls out all of the stops in The Woods, a wild ride featuring a rogues’ gallery of sadistic serial killers, ruthless private investigators, brain-damaged hippies, hardcore porn addicts, and former KGB agents. Readers will find it virtually impossible to unglue their eyes from the pages of this utterly compelling thriller. Paul Goat Allen
