Customer Reviews

Caught

5 star:		(151)
4 star:		(67)
3 star:		(31)
2 star:		(29)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

WOW!! What A Story!!

I don't want to tell you too much because I don't want to spoil any of the suspense the builds throughout this book but here are the basics:

This is the story of high school senior, Haley McWaid, the pride of her family, good grades, never gets in trouble, a little obsessive compulsive who doesn't come home one night and goes missing.

It is also the story of Dan Mercer, a social worker, who works with troubled teens, who may be a sexual predator, as he is "CAUGHT" by a television show, hosted by Wendy Tynes who is on a mission to expose internet predators. It also delves into the lives of Dan's old college roommates and how they may have complicated Dan's life. The whole thing leaves Wendy worrying about who she can trust.

This story takes more twists and turns than an old country road and you better be belted in. It is a story filled with tension, stress, pressure, that challenges the reader. It is a thrilling, gripping, spine tingling novel that deals with things that could only be seen on television setting up shop in this community.

Harlan Coben takes all these plots and ties them together in what I believe will be the best book I read this year.
You will be "CAUGHT" from the first page and you will not be RELEASED even after the last word.
This is definitely not a book to me missed.

[...]

I love Coben. He is one of my favorite writers. That's why it is so hard to dislike any of his books. But, unfortunately, try as I might, I simply can not like "Caught" or recommend it to anyone, including Coben fans.

The plot is one of those "ripped from the headlines" type. TV news show sets up pedophile for on camera arrest after doing the online meet thing. Really good premise and, initially, it takes some very interesting twists. It is the twists that does this book in. There is only so much "but wait, there's something else" that I can take even in mysteries/thrillers. And this book goes way past that limit. By the time you get to the end (and, frankly, I had to force myself to finish--something I would never have believed of a Harlan Coben book), the plot is so convoluted that it is hard to keep the players straight and then, finally, you just don't care.

In Coben's defense, he does a great job of making Wendy (the reporter and star of this book) a real person and, as I am a huge Myron Bolitar series fan, it was great to see Win worked into the plot as a minor character.

But, in the end, all the great characterizations does not save an overworked plot that wears thin long before the pages end.

I'm sorry to say this but skip "Caught" and catch one of Coben's older books for a good read.

Coben has never written a truly disappointing novel, but his last few efforts--beginning with "The Woods"--veered away from the twist-a-minute storytelling that made his earlier novels so compelling. The twists and accelerated pacing were still there, but to a noticeably smaller degree, and long-time readers couldn't help but feel that they had been treated to two seperate Cobens: Pre-"The Woods" Coben and Post-"The Woods" Coben.

"Caught" is a definitely a return to form for this astonishing thriller writer. The twists are back, the characterizations are as well-drawn as in previous works, and Coben's trademark "everyman slice-of-life suburbia" ruminations are as poignant and spot-on as ever.

More please.

This is my third Harlan Coben book. I enjoyed the others well enough to read a third, but Caught was, well frankly, just terrible. Coben starts out with a poorly disguised Nancy Grace character and tries to make her likeable. That didn't work. I actually read the whole book, hoping against hope that the ending would make it worth the effort. It didn't. I wanted to throw it against the wall. This story was contrived, boring, implausible, boring, annoying, boring, slow and, well, boring. Sorry to be so negative, but I just finished this and the ending was so bad it just made me mad, mad that I read the whole thing.

I've read every one of Coben's books other than the Myron Bolitar series. He's in my top ten favorite authors and I scour new book listings for his latest so I can be among the first to read them. I've loved them all. However, I read this one to the end waiting for it to redeem itself, and was so relieved when it was over. There is a BIG difference between "building suspense" and forcing readers to wait and slog agonizingly through an excess of extraneous detail that does not move, and is not necessary to, the plot or development of central characters. If I recall correctly, it took until around chapter 29 before it began to pick up the pace. And I'm not one of those readers who slavers over "action books", so it's not a case of being impatient with a genuine requirement for a measured pace. This one looks like he wrote it in an earlier century...back when they paid by the page. (Remember trudging through Moby Dick?) I do hope this is not a trend for him.

4 1/2 stars.

Harlan Coben's novels are a joy to read, in part, because they are so realistic that it is easy for the reader to imagine that the incidents were happening to someone they know, or to themselves.

Seventeen-year-old Haley Waid goes missing from her home and her parents realize that they are beginning to experience a parent's worst nightmare.

Elsewhere, we find social worker Dan Mercer, who is a giving person. He coaches girl's basketball and helps seriously troubled youngsters. Dan is in the midst of answering a young girl's plea to come to her home for assistance. He arrives and hears a voice telling him to come in. He enters the home and walks into a sting operation run by reporter Wendy Tynes and coordinated with the police.

Wendy's goal is to catch sexual preditors, publicly humilate them and have them arrested.

When Wendy confronts Dan and tells him that she knows that he walked into that home in order to have sex with an underage girl, Dan tells her that she's wrong and he's being set-up. Wendy scoffs that this is what they all say.

There is a pre-trial hearing but no matter what the outcome, Dan is labelled as a sexual preditator and faces public wrath.

This is a suspenseful, can't put down story where the facts are revealed gradually and Wendy attempts to get the real answers to what happened. However, there is much more to the story and her life and reputation face a stern test.

The characters are sympathetic and described in a believable manner, so much so that the reader can envision this happening to them or to someone they might know. This makes the novel brathtaking.

Caught by Coben is a really good book. Its hard to go into the plot here because of all the twists and turns it takes at the very end. Its a story that slowly builds to a satisfying climax.

The premise that this novel is created upon revolves around a missing high-school girl, a pedophile, and a reporter who outed the pedophile. Coben is good at creating a Hitchcock everyman character. A character like Cary Grant in North by Northwest or Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Knew Too Much. And were introduced to his typical everyman hero in the guise of Dan Mercer. Dan takes care of kids as a social worker and in the opening chapters he either was or was not set up as a pedophile caught by a news reporting team led by Wendy Tynes.

So my main beef with Caught is this. He gives us a character to root for with Dan Mercer. He gives us a character to despise with Wendy Tynes. But then Coben changes focus and concentrates on Tynes as the protagonist and Mercer is out of the picture. It took me a couple hundred pages to warm up to Tynes because of how Coben tore her apart right at the beginning. I dont think that as an author, Coben should have torn apart his protagonist like that. Readers, especially genre readers are drawn to likeable hero's. Wendy was NOT likeable to start with at least. And thus the story was at times difficult to slog through.

So, since I am not giving away the plot here, let me just finish by saying, this is a superior Coben effort (still waiting for the masterpiece). Its fun, its suspenseful, its a pretty damn interesting, and you'll be on the edge of your seat in anticipation of finding out what the heck is going on.

This book seems to have been written by two different people. The first 2/3s is full of clunky writing and cliches, enough that I almost gave up. Some examples:

A hush fell over the room. Ten-A-Fly took off his sunglasses as if they'd angered him. His scowl aimed at intimidation but seemed more in the neighborhood of constipation.

or:

Sussex County sheriff Mickey Walker loomed behind him like a solar eclipse.

or this snippet of dialogue:

Pops groused the entire way home. "I had that shawtry in the palm of my hand."
"Sorry." Then: "Shawtry?"
"I like to keep up on modern terms for chicks."

and:

Apparently, an "erotic dancer" (read "stripper") named "Desire" (maybe not her real name) had given the story to a local newspaper.

Hey, thanks for those parenthetical explanations! You mean strippers use made-up names!? You're kidding me!

There's a short paragraph where the adjective "beloved" is used not once but twice. Have you ever said that word, short of reading a paid-for obituary in the local paper?

Page 78:
She dived under the car, using it as a shield. She had left the door unlocked.
[4 lines later]:
She fished into her pocket and got her car remote. She unlocked the door.

Whoops. Bad continuity there.

Or this:

They were sprawled on the den furniture as only teenage boys can, as though they'd removed their skeletons, hung them in a nearby closet, and slid to a collapse against whatever upholstery was nearby.

There are so many things wrong with that sentence I don't know where to start.



Things change later in the book. Instead of reading like a fast first draft, the writing tightens up and serves the intriguing plot well. If the whole book had read this way, more stars.

Let me start by saying that I am a HUGE Harlan Coben fan. His books "Tell No One" and "The Woods" are some of the best suspense novels I've ever read, and Coben always has a twist at the end, so it was hard for me to give "Caught" one star, but I had to. This book is not the work I expect from Harlan Coben. The beginning was great - typcial Coben suspense, which I love - - but then it fell flat on its face. The story went in so many directions that I didn't know what he wanted the story to be about. You have Dan Wheeler, the social worker, accused of being a child predator; you have Wendy Tynes, the reporter, who nailed Wheeler as a predator on her TV show, and who has her own personal issues; you have four friends accused of things they supposedly didn't do, and you have a missing teenager. And the conclusion was dreadful! In fact, it was almost amateurish. It was like Coben was against the publisher's deadline, and he had to think of a quick conclusion. As I said in my title for this review - Did Coben write this book? Because this was not the quality work, with suspense throughout, and a twist at the end, that I expect from a Harlan Coben book. Hope he does better next time.

I am already a huge fan of Harlan Coben. I find his stories to be exceptionally well thought out, and extraordinarily complex. For example, "Caught" tied up loose ends in the story that I didn't know were still loose! Down to the last minutes of the story, Coben was sliding puzzle pieces into place. The guy is a master storyteller. I was very satisfied with the story as it ended.

Now, for the one story element that seemed to add little value - the middle-aged rap star. His character, while pathetic, added some humor to a fairly bleak storyline; however, I don't recall why this character was introduced. Seemed like a "third wheel" in the relationship between author and reader.

Who am I to criticize, though? I couldn't write a story with 1/100th of the creativity, complexity and depth of any of Coben's novels.

Please keep them coming, Harlan!