It’s all a bit preposterous – although I fell hard for the wise-cracking FBI agents – but Coben is such an old pro that he makes it work. Fortunately for him, the odds are in his favour, and so begins a fantastically breakneck prison break/fugitive adventure story. David suddenly finds his mojo and decides to break out of prison and investigate. Then his former wife’s sister turns up – his first visitor for years – and shows him a photograph that features, in the background, a boy of around eight who looks exactly like Matthew. David doesn’t remember doing it, though all evidence points his way he was so devastated at the trial that he didn’t put up a fight. In this instance, David Burroughs has been in prison for five years for the brutal murder of his beloved three-year-old son, Matthew. I Will Find You (Century) has a deliciously implausible premise – delicious because readers know we can trust Coben to find a nail-bitingly exciting way out of the set-up he outlines.
Harlan Coben’s latest is less stress-inducing but equally compelling. It’s all horribly claustrophobic, in the best possible way, as Gil starts to dig into Matthew’s past and present while his own behaviour becomes more unstable. He watches for “those small moments, carefully hidden for the most part, when Matthew’s true self peeked out” he watches him talk to his daughter, waiting for Matthew to hit her, but all he does is pour a glass of water “as if he was just a thirsty teen, an orphaned kid, and not at all what even now Gil saw in him: a terrible, violent monster, waiting patiently for the moment to strike”. While the women of his family appear to forgive the past and take Matthew at face value, Gil is convinced there is something evil in the teenager: that he is taunting his uncle – and that something dreadful lies ahead.
His sister and her husband have since died in a car crash, and Matthew, now 17, has come to live with Gil, Molly and their daughters. He has been estranged from his sister for years, having found her son, Matthew, looking on while his daughter struggled to surface in a swimming pool.
Gil is a creative writing teacher at a university in rural Vermont, happily married with two daughters. I can’t say that I enjoyed Nathan Oates’s A Flaw in the Design (Serpent’s Tail), but I certainly read it at speed in a state of high stress and anxiety, as the tension built inexorably and I began to feel just as haunted (hunted?) as the author’s protagonist.
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