Book Talk: Harlan Coben, ‘The Woods’

Harlan Coben is a best-selling author whose previous novel, The Stranger, has been the basis for a Netflix series.According to the cover of The Woods (2007, 404 pages in both hardback and softback), this work, too, is coming to Netflix.Coben’s novels have been translated into 45 languages and he’s sold more than 75 million copies of his mystery/thrillers worldwide.He’s on the short list of my favorite contemporary authors.

In The Woods, Paul Copeland, prosecutor for the District Attorney’s office in New York, is standing in the elementary school gymnasium watching his daughter Cara go through her routine on the low parallel bars when he is approached by a couple of cops.They inform him that a body has just been recovered, and there is evidence that points to him.The body has been identified as that of Manolo Santiago, a name that is unfamiliar to him.Nevertheless, the body is somehow linked to a twenty-year-old event when Paul’s sister Camille, her boyfriend, and two others went missing in the woods during summer camp.

Paul’s wife died several years ago, and he’s struggling to balance his career with being a single parent.He’s haunted by guilt because he was “on watch duty” the night of the disappearance at camp when he was a teen and a camp counselor.And he’s dealing with intense stress on the job because his current case involves a local college fraternity, and the powerful parents of the students are putting extreme pressure on him to clear their children.