The Boy from the Woods

A man who started as a headline

Harlan Coben has written about enough ordinary men with one extraordinary skill to fill a small library, so the thing that caught me about The Boy from the Woods is that Wilde, his newest hero, has no skill at all that can be named on a resume. In 1986, a boy was found alone in the forest near Westville, New Jersey. He could speak English. He could not say his name, where he was from, or how he had survived. Nobody ever found out. The tabloids called him the boy from the woods, the foster system gave him the name Wilde because a social worker had a sense of humor, and the family who took him in later adopted him and raised him ordinary. As an adult he built a private security firm with his foster sister Rola, walked away from it, and moved back to the woods where he was found, into a house he built himself, because the only place that has ever made sense to him is the one where nobody knows his story.

Coben, published by Grand Central in 2020, uses that setup to do something he does not usually do: the loner at the center of this book is lonelier than Myron Bolitar ever was, and the book is less interested in fixing him than in watching what a town does to outsiders who refuse to be adopted. It is also the first of the Wilde series, and the door it leaves open at the end is one of the better cliffhangers in a career full of them.

Hester Crimstein adopts a case

The story proper starts with a missing teenager. Naomi Pine is fifteen or so, a student at the local high school, and she comes from the kind of house the whole town knows about. Her father Bernard drinks, or worse. Her mother left years ago. At school she is the standing target of the popular crowd, led by Crash Maynard, and being the target has worn her down to the point that she has stopped trying to be seen.

What gets the plot moving is that Naomi's classmate Matthew Crimstein, a decent kid with a famous grandmother, gets worried enough to call that grandmother. Hester Crimstein is the best-known defense attorney in the state and a recurring favorite in Coben's later books, a woman built entirely out of opinions and blazers, and Matthew is the son of her late son David, which makes him the center of her world. She calls in favors, and the favors she calls are Wilde, who was David's closest friend, and Oren Carmichael, the local police chief. Wilde is also Matthew's godfather. The web of people around this case is the book's first real information: Hester and Wilde and Oren all love the same dead man, and none of them agree on how to honor him.

The 48-hour challenge

Naomi turns up. She is hiding in the basement of her own house, and the reason is almost worse than a crime. She has been playing the 48-hour challenge, a game the girls at school use to farm attention, where a kid vanishes for two days and posts evidence afterward to prove the disappearance was real. Naomi did the woods first, then her basement, and the point was to make the bullies miss her. It is a sad, small plan, and Hester, who made a public appeal on the news, feels like a fool for it. Worse, the challenge only makes the bullying sharper, because now Naomi is a cheat as well as a target. Then she disappears again, and this time nobody can find her, and the book stops being a missing person story and becomes a story about the machinery of a town that keeps a girl like Naomi expendable.

While Wilde is digging into Naomi's second disappearance, the plot's other engine turns over. At a party at Maynard Manor, Matthew does some amateur sleuthing and gets noticed. Crash Maynard and his friends learn that Hester is nosing around about Naomi, blame Matthew, and beat him in a way that is meant to be remembered. Wilde arrives in time to stop it, and in the process he humiliates Gavin Chambers, the professional head of security at the Maynard estate, who is moonlighting there from his real job working for Senator Rusty Eggers. That humiliates is the operative word. Gavin does not forget. Neither does Wilde.

The Maynard machine

The Maynards are the richest family in the book, and every dollar of it has a documentary crew or a campaign attached. Dash Maynard is a television producer, the kind who makes things people watch and then complains about what they watch. Delia is his wife, and Crash, the son, is a bully with a skull ring and no visible fathering. Crash goes missing. For a while the working theory is that he and Naomi, bully and victim, ran away together, which is the kind of theory that says more about the people saying it than about the missing kids. Then the ransom demand arrives.

The kidnappers want all the incriminating footage Dash has on Rusty Eggers. Dash has been sitting on it for years, and everybody in the book's political orbit knows it, because Dash treats it the way rich men treat insurance: never used, always priced in. The Maynards comply, but they send an edited, incomplete version of the video, and the kidnappers respond by mailing them their son's severed finger with the skull ring still on it. Suddenly Dash and Delia are Hester's clients and Wilde's responsibility, and the clock is running.

While the negotiation lurches forward, a version of the footage leaks anyway: a video showing Rusty Eggers sexually assaulting a teenage girl, a former actress. It should end him. Instead, his operation does what operations do now. Bots, counterspin, chaos, distraction, and a deliberate strategy of making the entire public conversation so toxic that voters decide the whole thing is fake and move on. Coben writes these scenes with contempt that does not need adjectives. Rusty weathers the leak and comes out ahead, and the book is direct about why: the truth, released into a system built to drown it, stops being a weapon.

Raymond Stark and the murder nobody paid for

The footage matters because of what it does not show, and the book's best thread is the one Hester pulls out of the rubble. A former colleague of Dash and Rusty tells her that Rusty once killed a man. Saul Strauss, an attorney who has spent his life fighting the fights Hester gave up on, has been chasing the same thread for years, and he brings Wilde to Sing Sing Correctional Facility to meet Raymond Stark.

Raymond is serving time for the murder of Christopher Anson. The three of them, Anson, Rusty, and the Maynards among them, all interned together on Capitol Hill in the years when everyone in Washington was a future something. Anson was murdered, and the body and the weapon were arranged so the crime landed on Raymond, a Black man with the wrong job and the wrong zip code to fight back. After Raymond went to prison, someone arranged for him to be attacked, and the attack left him paralyzed from the waist down. He has been sitting in that chair inside that cell ever since, watching the men who put him there run for higher office.

The footage Dash kept as insurance shows Rusty with Anson's corpse and the murder weapon, instructing Dash on how to help move and dispose of the body. Dash turned the tape into a decades-long leash: he demanded that Rusty break up with Delia, whom Rusty had been dating at the time, as part of the price of silence. And that is where the story folds in on itself. Delia, pressured years later, tells the truth at last. Anson did not simply die. He raped her, drunkenly and violently, and she killed him defending herself, and Rusty handled the corpse. The woman Dash spent years protecting from his supposed rival was protecting all of them from an older truth. Delia refuses to cooperate with any version of events that would free Raymond, because saying it out loud means saying all of it, and Raymond stays where he is.

The garage, the finger, and an unprincipled peace

The hunt for Crash comes down to GPS and patience. Wilde and Rola trace the kidnappers to a closed highway rest stop, an empty garage on a dead stretch of road. The men holding Crash turn out to be two people nobody would have paired: Gavin Chambers, the security man Wilde humiliated, and Saul Strauss, the social justice lawyer. They have opposite politics and one common enemy. Rusty Eggers, in their telling, is a man whose real project is turning everybody into an extremist, because extremists spend and vote and never notice. Gavin and Saul kidnapped a teenager, cut off his finger, and terrorized his family to get the tape, and in their ledger the math still clears.

Rola takes Crash out and gets him to a hospital in time to reattach the finger. Wilde stays. He lets Gavin and Saul publish the murder tape, the one showing Rusty with the body, before he walks into their hideout and confronts them. He is angrier in that room than he has been in the entire book. What they did to a kid to serve a cause is exactly the style of the people they claim to oppose, and he tells them so. Then he lets them walk away, which is the kind of choice Coben's heroes make when the law is no longer an option and violence is not their answer. The tape goes public. Rusty weathers that too, or most of it. Raymond stays in prison, where the book leaves him.

Naomi, again

The missing girl thread resolves late and quietly, which some readers will find anticlimactic and others will find honest. Matthew finally confesses his part in the story. At the party where this all turned, Crash's crew destroyed a stuffed animal Naomi loved. Matthew found her in the woods afterward and kissed her. When the others saw, they mocked him for it, and to buy back his standing in the group he agreed to a prank: ask Naomi out, then vanish on her. He did it. He hated himself for it, and his apology is real, and Wilde, his godfather, does not let him off the hook, which is one of the book's better exchanges.

Naomi's home life is the actual danger, and the adults had it backward. Bernard Pine is the abuser, not the woman the town had decided to blame. Pia, Naomi's mother in every way that matters, has been hiding the girl not from the law but from him. And then comes the reveal the story has been holding: Ava O'Brien, Wilde's ex girlfriend, the teacher at the school, is Naomi's biological mother, and she has been circling the case because she wanted to rescue her daughter. When Wilde finally locates the two of them, he drives out to say goodbye and then, in the last pages, does the most impulsive thing he has done in the whole book. He gets in the car. He goes with them.

What the book leaves standing

Coben spends his endings tidying, and this one leaves more mess than usual, on purpose. Hester learns what really happened the night her son David died: a bar, a few drinks, Wilde leaving first, David driving anyway, the crash, and Wilde finding him first and lying to protect him from the consequences that no longer mattered because David was gone. It is the wound under every relationship in the book, and Hester, who has spent years half-blamed for being difficult, gets to put it down at last. She had ended things with Oren after one date that worked and one that brought the grief back, but the book lets them find each other again, and the two of them close the novel as a couple. Laila, David's widow, moves on with a man named Darryl, and Wilde's arrangement with her ends without drama.

Wilde himself ends the book with a DNA test and a single hit: a distant relative, initials PB, who agrees to meet. That is the hook for The Match, and it is also the first real thread in a life that has been built entirely out of unanswered questions.

The flaws are the usual Coben flaws, tinted dark. There are too many strands by the midpoint, and the Naomi thread gets crowded out by the political material for stretches, so the emotional center of the book and the thriller center of the book do not always speak to each other. Some of the satire of media manipulation reads almost too true to function as satire, which is a compliment with an edge. And readers arriving from the Myron Bolitar books should know they are getting something angrier here, a book where the good guys lose ground, the villain keeps his career, an innocent man stays in his chair in his cell, and the best available outcome is a teenager's finger sewn back on and a loner getting into a car with a woman and a girl he might be able to protect. It is not a feel-good ending. It is the ending the book earned, and it left me wanting the next one.