Tell No One: A Novel

This was my first Harlan Coben book. Not sure how I feel about it. I think I’d rate higher, but the motivations of the main characters seemed random. And the couple at the center of this story seemed weirdly one-dimensional and disconnected, even though they have supposedly been soulmates their entire lives. Very twisty-turny. A lot happening at once, as the plot comes to a head. But I lost interest, the more convoluted it became. I may need to read another story by this author, before I draw further conclusions. He certainly has a huge fan base.

I quite enjoyed this book! It has been a long time since I sat down with a good thriller/suspense novel and I'm glad this is the one that I chose to get me back into the genre. While I began to see certain things falling into place fairly early, I still enjoyed how the book turned out (although a part of me wishes that things would have gone slightly different, but I'll cover that in the spoiler-y part below). Corben will definitely be on my regular rotation for a while.

Warning! Spoilers!

Okay, so here is all I'm going to say regarding spoilers: I sort of wish that, since Elizabeth turned out to be alive, that she would have disappeared for a "cooler" reason than she did. I will say that there was a twist ending to this novel that I will NOT spoil, but I was slightly hoping that she was going to turn out to be a spy or something. Shallow, I know, but still it would have been fun. All said and done though, I found myself troubled throughout this book seeing that I am married as well. I find that I always try to place myself in the shoes of the characters, and I couldn't help but empathize with Beck on multiple levels as I too would have gone way off the edge to determine if my wife were still alive.

At any rate, I know this is a horrible review of a book. I will wrap it up by saying this: It was a fun, quick read and great for a quick thriller.

I feel badly that all my goodreads friends enjoyed this book and I did not. I just found the plot to be needlessly convoluted and messy. I'm not a huge mystery reader but I recently read Michaelides's The Silent Patient and Copenhaver's Dodging and Burning which I found to be artfully written to obfuscate the solution to the mystery while still allowing it to be clear in retrospect that it could have been solved. I also read two Louise Penny books and Pek's The Verifiers that might fall into more of a cozy mystery category but that contained more enjoyable characters with whom I wanted to spend time.

Perhaps, as is sometimes the case, I would have enjoyed the movie more.