Caught by Harlan Coben

Pub. Date: March 2011
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Format: E-book/Library Book
Read: 6/25/2011
My rating: 4 stars

Seventeen-year-old Haley McWaid is a good girl, the pride of her suburban New Jersey family, headed off to college next year with all the hopes and dreams her doting parents can pin on her. Which is why, when her mother wakes one morning to find that Haley never came home the night before and three months quickly pass without word from the girl, the community assumes the worst.

Wendy Tynes is a reporter on a mission: to bring down sexual predators via elaborate—and nationally televised—sting operations. Wendy and her team have shamed dozens of men by the time she encounters her latest target. Dan Mercer is a social worker known as a friend to troubled teens, but his story soon becomes more complicated than Wendy could have imagined.

Caught tells the story of a missing girl, the predator who may have taken her, and the reporter who suddenly realizes she can’t trust her own instincts about this story—or the motives of the people around her.

Harlan Coben is one of the few fiction writers I like, mainly because when he writes a mystery, he includes the human element, his books are part mystery, partly a commentary on human nature.

In this book, like in many of his books, he shows how the things we do affect us for the rest of our lives. It is also interesting how he reveals thought processes, he weaves modern technology into the story and provides enough twists to keep me interested.

More then a mystery, this is a story of how modern technology can be abused, and how revenge is ‘a dish best served cold’ for many people.