Caught

Description:
Seventeen-year-old Haley McWaid is a good girl, the pride of her suburban New Jersey family, headed off to college next year with all the hopes and dreams her doting parents can pin on her. Which is why, when her mother wakes one morning to find that Haley never came home the night before and three months quickly pass without word from the girl, the community assumes the worst.

Wendy Tynes is a reporter on a mission: to bring down sexual predators via elaborate—and nationally televised—sting operations. Wendy and her team have shamed dozens of men by the time she encounters her latest target. Dan Mercer is a social worker known as a friend to troubled teens, but his story soon becomes more complicated than Wendy could have imagined.

Caught tells the story of a missing girl, the predator who may have taken her, and the reporter who suddenly realizes she can’t trust her own instincts about this story—or the motives of the people around her.





written by Harlan Coben
ISBN: 9780525951636

Comments:
Harlan Coben is one of my favorite authors. His incredible plots keep me turning the pages late into the night. CAUGHT is a thriller about the fragility of innocence and the hope of forgiveness.

The novel revolves around Wendy Tynes, a widowed TV reporter with a high school senior son named Charlie. She's known for one of those shows where they trap child predators into coming to a house expecting to see a child but instead are greeted by television cameras and police. When she catches social worker Dan Mercer coming to the house, evidence builds that points to Dan's guilt. But of course, this is a Coben novel, and nothing is as it seems.

Across town, Haley McWaid is disappears from her suburban home. Her parents have no idea where the high school senior could be. Is her disappearance related to Dan or something else all together. And what do Dan Mercer's ex-roommates at Princeton have to do with everything. Wendy begins investigating Dan's friends and discovers even more secrets beneath the surface of the illusion of everyday life.

I guarantee the plot will keep you turning the pages. The twists are fast and furious. Coben throws in a few characters from other novels that are always fun. Wendy Tynes as the lead isn't a great character like some of the leads in THE INNOCENT or NO SECOND CHANCE, but Coben is still at the top of his game. The novel ends powerfully, making me wonder how I would act in a similar situation and making all readers wondering if they would have the strength to forgive after so much tragedy.