Missing You by Harlan Coben

Missing You is a standalone novel by the well known thriller author Harlan Coben, who has also written the popular Myron Bolitar series.

Having read almost all his books, I have to admit that while the Myron Bolitar series is excellent, I still prefer his gritty and almost painfully suspenseful standalone thrillers. Maybe because I love thrillers more than lighter detective (sometimes humorous) novels, or maybe because the world of sports is not really my arena.

As the author has just released his latest book, The Stranger, I figured I would quickly read Missing You, published last year, to be fully caught up.

Missing You is about Kat Donovan, a detective with the NYPD, who is basically a workaholic with no real love life. When a friend talks her into checking out an online dating site, just to give a bit of pfiff to her already boring and sad – career focused – life, she does exactly that.

And gets the shock of her life in the process. Because one of the pictures there shows her ex-fiance Jeff, who is seemingly also looking for love – or at least a little romance online.

It takes her a bit of soul searching before she decides to contact him on the site. He answers flirtatiously, without apparently remembering her. When she mentions to him a few things which should spark the memory of their time together and there is still no recall, she finally tells him who she really is. But he suddenly stops all correspondence on a note of ‘let’s leave the past in the past, shall we?’

Now Kat feels rejected – once again, and decides enough is enough of all this online dating stuff. It’s not for her. Except she can’t forget her only love, who just happened to pop back into her life all these years later.

Soon Kat is contacted by a young college student who wants her to find his mom, who apparently used an online dating site and disappeared with a guy she met, never to be seen again. What gets Kat back in the saddle is the fact that the young man’s mom used the very online site where she found Jeff, and even worse, it might just the same Jeff who whisked away his mom to god knows where. Or is it?

This starts an adventurous and dangerous journey for Cat in finding out not only what happened to the guy’s mom, while also secretly searching for her own dad’s killer, but also trying to figure out how Jeff is involved in all this, and why so many women end up dead after visiting that very match making site.

It is usual in a Harlan Coben book to find several plot lines which will all intersect in one major story, and this book is no different. All plots are always somehow related, and only by reading the book to the end we can know for sure what is really going on.

The plot is gripping and full of tension, just the way I expected from Harlan Coben. There is a bit of romance, but not enough to destroy the thriller aspect of the story. There are killers here so vicious that I didn’t believe these kinds of people actually existed. But sadly they do exist, and not only in novels.

Missing You is a roller coaster of a book and I really did finish it in two sittings, both times staying up until very late with just one extra chapter to go, one more, and one more, until it was almost dawn. But it was so well worth it!

I found the characters realistic and believable and while the story line was out there as it was, it was still well in the realm of possibilities (and I think here of a subtle warning to all the lonely people visiting sites like match.com and similar).

Overall I loved Missing You and I’m now looking forward to reading his latest thriller The Stranger, which is already loaded on my iPad’s Kindle app.