Customer Reviews

The Woods

5 star:		(111)
4 star:		(71)
3 star:		(28)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

With "The Woods," Coben proves again to be one of the most consistent thriller writers around. This is familiar territory, with familiar themes and characters (even a few carryovers from previous stories), and yet Coben manages to connect with us on emotional and intellectual levels.

Twenty years earlier, the Copeland family dealt with a horrific situation involving the woods surrounding a summer camp. Now, one of the original homicide victims has resurfaced--with a different name and hints that he survived. Paul Copeland finds himself dragged back into the anguish of that dreadful evening. Not only did he lose his sister, he lost real connection with his parents, due to their grief. As he explores the widening mysteries, he is faced to confront hard truths about each and every person he has loved.

As always, Coben mixes suspense, mystery, subplots, and twists, with themes of family and loyalty and loss. "The Woods" is a fast read. Although a bit shallower on some levels than "Gone for Good" or "Tell No One," this story still gives us more reason to care than many other thrillers out there. Coben's soft heart comes through once again--and for that, I'll keep coming back.

Originality is always a prized quality in a novel, but sometimes you just need a predictable, unchallenging, fast-food sort of book for a hectic time. That's when I turn to the "thrillers" shelf and writers like Harlan Coben.

"The Woods" is the story of Essex County Prosecutor Paul Copeland and his twenty-year-old family tragedy. His sister, Camille, and three other campers went into the woods one summer night; two bodies were found, but not his sister's. The tragedy tore Paul's family apart, and he never came to terms with his role as the camp counselor who should have been keeping watch.

When the other missing camper turns up dead -- but recently so -- Paul's world spins out of control again. He's embroiled in the rape trial of two fraternity boys and their families will do anything to keep the boys out of prison. The threat to Paul's family and career is vicious -- unrealistically so, I thought, but maybe I'm naive in the wicked ways of the world.

Coben writes with a satisfying assurance and the characters are reasonably well-defined, though the women are strangely stereotyped and hard to know. Paul Copeland moves plausibly through the well-paced story. While I didn't care passionately about his outcome, I did wish him well -- assuming that everything would be happily resolved, as it usually is in this type of book. Coben surprised me with an ambiguous ending, which I considered to be a good thing.

The complicated plot is developed and wrapped up well, a real strength of this book, though there are some elements that fit poorly in the story. Specifically, I wish he had downplayed or eliminated the brutal tactics of the accused boys' families; the stunning private investigator posing as the dead man's girlfriend; the brain-fried ex-hippie; and especially the KGB retrospective. The KGB connection should not, in my opinion, have been written into the plot; it was the jarring element for me.

I also would have preferred more development of a story line with Paul's sister-in-law and her husband, accused of embezzling from a charity in the name of Paul's late wife. Paul seems to have given that situation less attention than expected.

In spite of the shortcomings of the plot, I did enjoy Coben's smooth, satisfying writing and the effective flow of the story -- and the way "The Woods" represents the genre. I knew Coben's work only by reputation, and I would read another for the pleasure of his writing style.

For those strong pluses, and considering this book against others of its type, I am going with four stars.

Linda Bulger, 2008

I'm a big fan of Harlan Coben. I've read five of his novels, including his newest, THE WOODS. Each novel is captivating and thrilling, full of twists and turns. In his latest, Paul Copeland is the Essex County, New Jersey prosecuter. He is knee deep in the middle of a rape case when he gets the call from some detectives in New York. It seems they believe Copeland can help them with the details of an unsolved murder, a murder that may relate to the brutal slaying of Copeland's sister 20 years ago.

Twenty years ago at an idealic summer camp, four teenagers were brutally murdered, including Copeland's sister Camille. The killer is behind bars, and Copeland is just now getting on with his life, learning to raise his six year old daughter alone after his wife's death from cancer. Lucy Gold, a professor at a nearby college and Copeland's ex-girlfriend, begins receiving a journal in a creative writing class from one of her students. Turns out that journal is recreating in vivid detail the night of those murders. Who could be writing the journal? How could they know about that night? Loren Muse, a holdover from a previous Coben novel, has a strong role as Copeland's chief investigator.

As is typical with Coben novels, he throws a lot at you, and most of it sticks. There are twists right down to the last page, and all of the plot loose ends are resolved. This is the first novel where Coben's novel seems formulaic and not unique. He seems to enjoy the theme of people once thought dead possibly being alive. Copeland's daughter and deceased wife really play no role in the story. The Russian, KGB angle also seemed contrived and unnecessary. Still, Coben has the knack for making the implausible plausible, and having fun with even the most far-fetched scenario.

If you haven' t read Coben yet, then I recommend him highly to you. Perhaps you could start with TELL NO ONE, or even go back to the beginning of his Myron Bolitar series (which I haven't read yet.) Once you start reading his books, you'll keep coming back. Despite some of the unrealistic plots, you'll be able to sense the enthusiasm and fun in Coben's writing and want to come back for more.

Coben became a "must read" author for me some time ago, and while this book did not disappoint, it doesn't stand up there with his best works, including his last novel, PROMISE ME. His most common theme is certainly present, that is, the past echoing into the present.

In this tale, a prosecutor is confronted with a Coben-special blast from the past: a body turns up who appears to be the boy who supposedly died 20 years ago with the prosecutor's sister and two other young people at a camp where all of them worked. Of course, his body was never found, nor was Camille's (the sister).

Paul, the prosecutor, begins tracing down leads, and with the help of an old flame from the camp days, begins bringing the past to the surface, as commonly occurs in Coben's works.

It's a well plotted story that left me just a bit cold at the end, and I think it was because I never came to care about Coben's characters quite as much as I usually do. They seemed, as a group, to be less attractive than usual. Perhaps (or probably, even) this is by the author's design, but it didn't work as well for me.

Even so, I wanted to get to the payoff and had trouble putting the book down. Just not as much trouble as I usually have with Coben's works.

I have no idea what process Harlan Coben may have been working through on a personal level when he wrote this book - for his sake, I hope it was cathartic. Unfortunately for me, it also used up many bedtime hours of normally pleasurable reading. In fact, it is such a disappointing departure that I'm secretly convinced that someone else (an intern, perhaps?) wrote this book while Coben was vacationing: in the real woods of northern Montana.

The very things that make Coben's Myron Bolatar series such fun reading - the quirky characters, wise-guy dialog, flawed heroes and wacky plots - were sadly missing from The Woods.

Add to that a plot line that can only be described as ludicrous. When I'm reading a mystery, trying to follow along and deduce the killer's identity, it's never a nice feeling to discover that the reason the killer was so elusive is that no one in their right mind could have thought up the explanation.

(Following are similes - not spoilers) - How well would To Kill A Mockingbird have turned out, I wonder, had we learned that the actual murderer was a local neighborhood boy who was in reality a trained CIA operative no longer working with the Khmer Rouge, but now living a secret identity in Hohokus, New Jersey and an active member of the remnants of the Bahder-Meinhof gang?

Like an idiot, I blindly followed this trail all the way to its miserable ending. My reluctance to wake the family is the only reason I didn't shout out "You have GOT to be kidding me!" and fling open a window and chuck this book out into where it should never have been milled from in the first place: The Woods.

Harlan, let us know when you're back on track, or when you've fired whoever wrote this book and paid you to use your name on it. It's not that we want to pigeon-hole you into only Myron Bolitar novels. But next time you venture afield of that formula, I'm going to need to say a BEVY of killer reviews before I'll pick it up. I didn't donate this book to our local library - I recycled it.

Harlan Coben's thrillers have been some of the best I've read, and "The Woods" is my favorite, hands down. The complex characters here, especially the two main ones--the prosecutor and the professor--have a past history that is revealed bit by bit throughout the main plot, which gets more exciting as the chapters go by. This is no "fluff" read. The chapters are more than three or four pages long and the author also makes the action dramatic without the cursing used in so many other books like this. (Not that I'm opposed to cursing when it's appropriate, but it's good to see a writer who can use a vocabulary beyond four-letter words to keep you interested.)

Pick it up and you won't be disappointed. (And as far as Publishers Weekly's crack about "implausibilities" goes, this is a "popular, crime novel genre." Thank God no one lives a life like this!

The Woods by Harlan Coben is a twisty read that will lead the reader to a satisfying conclusion. At a little over 400 pages, The Woods is substantial enough to keep you interested with interesting characters and a storyline that is engaging. I've always liked the way Coben frames the scenes in his books and though I haven't read every one of his novels, I have read enough of them to see the development of a potentially terrific author, especially in the last two.

The plot here is straightforward. As a teenager Paul Copeland allowed two teenagers to wander into the woods where they were murdered. Two others, his sister included, disappeared and until recently were never

seen again. Plausible? Why not? Its fiction.

This is a good beach read if you happen to be heading that way.

Harlan Coben is a writer who specializes in domestic thrillers with a twist: Instead of the protagonist being a woman, Coben's heroes are men with deep dark secrets. Coben takes folks who, at first glance, are fairly ordinary and then puts them in extraordinary situations. This helps makes the novels stand out in a genre populated with cops, private detectives and world weary types in general.

In The Woods, the main character is a single father who is also a prosecutor. His latest case is a headline grabber involving wealthy fraternity boys who are accused of raping a stripper. The father of one of the accused is trying to warn the prosecutor off the case.

As it happens, the prosecutor has a skeleton in his closet that has a distinct bearing on this case. If it is publicly revealed, then all could be lost.

The Woods is an excellent, highly original thriller.

My first reading of Harlan Coben was a mistake, other reviews spoke highly of his writings, but no so of "The Woods." I agree with them, I thought it stunk on plot, but well written getting it two stars instead of only one. First, there were two plots going on, the rape trial of two college boys and second, an unsolved multiple murder occurring in a camp where the protagonist of this book worked, Then the author tried to interconnect the two, and what a mess. Vindictiveness on the part of the parents of the college students undergoing trial leading to partitioning of the prosecuting attorney's thoughts and a big fuss over it, something I thought would be automatic in any case for any prosecutor. And what good did it do the parents? It ruined the career of a good attorney but did nothing to advance the main plot of the book. Then there was the twenty year gap, leading to murder of one individual which brings out red herrings galore, killings occurring for psychological reasons, killing occurring to prevent detection of other murders, people being declared dead who are later found to be alive but the proper people either deny it or refuse to accept it. What a mess!

On and on it goes, twists and turns all over the place, love returning, love declared, love refused, love leading to embarrassment and self-loathing. How the author kept everything straight I don't understand but he did, the reader following him like myself, had trouble, sometimes bad enough so I wanted to throw the book away, like some of the other reviewers of this book but I was always able to stifle the impulse. I sure was glad to finish this book, but I will confess it was well written enough so that I am willing to try another book by this author on other reviewer's good reading lists.

The central character is Paul Copeland, a county prosecutor in New Jersey. While in the midst of arguing the prosecution's case at the trial of two wealthy college fraternity brothers accused of rape, he is questioned about the murder of a man in New York City. This man's death appeared to be connected to an incident that happened twenty years earlier at a summer camp attended by the then-teenaged Copeland. It was believed that four youths were murdered one night, deep in the woods, although only two bodies were found. One of the victims was Copeland's sister. Copeland has long been haunted by the events of that night, for, it turns out, he was more than just the brother of a victim.

From this starting point, the novel takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride of plot twists and turns. I'm not a speed reader, but I finished this book in record time (for me) because I was able to race through the extremely well written pages. The only speed bumps were occasional digressions in the form of overlong explanations as the story developed. Also, there were a few false conclusions, something like the amusement park ride that gives you a couple of extra shocks near the end.

But it was an exciting read (ride), well worth the cost of admission.