by Harlan Coben (Orion)
There’s another certainty besides death and taxes: the certainty that some authors won’t let you down when it comes to a good read; Coben is one of these.
In The Stranger, Adam Price is a lawyer living the dream – a mostly happy marriage to a beautiful woman, a lovely home, two happy and well-adjusted, normal boys, a satisfying and well-paying job.
Then, standing in for his wife, Corinne, the treasurer of the school lacrosse board, at a team selection meeting, a friendly, open-looking young man walks up to Adam and tells him a shattering story about her.
The rest of the evening is a blur as the young man’s bombshell rocks his world. He reels between disbelief and testing the possibility it could be true, and begins to dig a little before he confronts her.
Then all hell breaks loose and his – and his beloved boys’ – world plunges into a crisis no one, including the stranger, has foreseen. For there are other people out there with bigger, blacker secrets and they have “people” who have their own agendas and reasons for not wanting these secret-revealers to keep on with their mission of justice and blackmail.
Adam is just desperate to stop his family from destruction. But he will have to learn – fast – who he can trust and who and why people are being killed.
A great, easy-to-read, engrossing book to curl up on the couch with and escape the world. Coben really does deliver the goods.