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Adam Price is filling in for his wife at a meeting of the local lacrosse team board when a stranger strikes up a conversation with him. The stranger casts doubt upon Adam's wife's, Corrine's, miscarriage a number of years ago and suggests that he check out a website. Thus begins Adam's descent into a world for which he seems to have lost the road map. Soon, his wife is missing, he discovers that she has been tracking him on a hidden phone app, his sons are frantic without Corrine's guidance, and the men on the lacrosse board seem suddenly sinister.
While Adam searches for his wife, he comes to understand more and more about what drove Corrine to lie and whether or not her lying to him matters to their relationship. In the meantime, a woman is murdered half the country away in Ohio, and small town Police Chief Johanna Griffin struggles to understand why her close friend, Heidi, was killed. As she investigates, she uncovers a contact between Heidi and a stranger, and this lead ultimately sends her east toward Adam and his search for Corrine. As they work separately and together to find the stranger who appears to be sharing devastating secrets from victims' pasts, the reader is introduced to the stranger's motives and modus operandi, and how his acts of revealing have led to unintended and ever expanding tragedies.
THE STRANGER is set in suburban New Jersey, an area I know well, and Coben is spot-on with his characterizations. The desperation of stay-at-home moms manifesting itself in the need to live through their children's accomplishments, and the similar desperation of downsized dads to maintain a façade of wealth and success, are both depicted in intimate detail. The hidden lies and secrets that grow out of the place, time, and circumstances fuel the tension in the book, resulting in a plot that seems both down to earth and suspenseful at the same time. Coben sustains the suspense through short chapters alternating among varying characters and perspectives. Each of the characters is fully fleshed out in this manner, helping the reader to keep track of the complicated and twisty plot.
Once I started THE STRANGER, I did not want to put it down. Harlan Coben has written dozens of thrillers, although this is the first I've read. It will not be the last!
§ Sharon Mensing is the Head of School of Emerald Mountain School, an independent school in the mountains of Colorado, where she lives, reads, and enjoys the outdoors.
Reviewed by Sharon Mensing, March 2015
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