MISSING YOU

This is a dreadful book. I picked it up because that nice Mr Stotter at Shots Ezine wanted someone to take a look at it, and, luck of the draw, I was picked.

I read my first Harlan Coben back in the days when he was writing the Myron Bolitar series. My first book by him suffered - but only because of comparison. I had just reviewed Angel's Flight by Michael Connelly, and to be honest, any book by any author after that would have paled by comparison.

However, this book … well, I picked it up, and read the first few lines, and it ruined my life.

I read it on the bus and got car sick. I read it at home and irritated my wife. I read it while walking and fell and twisted my ankle. I read it while sitting at my desk, supposedly working. I read it between tutorials at university when I should have been preparing for the next student … I couldn't put the damn book down.

Kat Donovan is the daughter of a (dead) cop. She is hard, fairly abrasive, but basically on the side of the angels. Her passions: work and finding out who it was who killed her father. But her life is too busy for men, ever since losing the one man she really loved eighteen years ago.

And then, her (wow, drop-dead gorgeous) friend puts her onto a dating site to try to find her a man … and she finds the man she lost all those years ago. But her attempts to reignite the flames of passion are rejected rather harshly. She has to move on.

However, life gets in her way. A boy comes to ask her to investigate the disappearance of his mother. Except the boy has a difficult background, and the local police point out that his mother is off on a holiday with her first boyfriend in many years.

All of which makes a pretty good story. But then the second strand, which ties things together, is the farm in rural Pennsylvania, where Titus and his companions are raising a curious crop, one that makes a fortune.

This book held me spellbound. It is superbly paced, it has believable, credible characters, it is, in short, a brilliant story, told by a writer who is at the very top of his game.

And now I have to go and try to catch up on all the damn work I failed to get on with because of this book!

If you see this book, buy it and read it.