Several decades ago, a young boy was discovered living alone in the woods. The boy was put in foster care; the authorities assumed the boy would eventually be claimed. But no such thing happened. The boy, nicknamed Wilde, grew up and became a… PI? Enforcer? Jack of All Trades in the security business? We don’t know, we don’t care. All we know is that the boy’s memories never came back, save for one: a red banister, a portrait of a man, and the sound of a woman screaming.
This is the second book that has Wilde as a main character, and if you’re at all interested about where he came from then you might as well skip ahead to this one. Where the first book dropped a few tantalising hints, this one goes all out in its focus on Wilde. Which is odd, because this is clearly the start to a series, and having the whole thing drawn out would’ve been more interesting and probably smarter from a marketing point of view. Maybe Coben just grew tired of his main character; he’s done it before. Who knows.
There’s a secondary plot about DNA-testing websites, which is actually fairly interesting; one of them leads Wilde to a reality TV star slash influencer who may be his half brother and who has vanished after news of a scandal broke. Coben clearly isn’t a fan of the whole culture, but really, who is? Wilde doesn’t buy into the theory that the disappearance is actually suicide, so he looks into it, but then every witness suddenly turns up dead and the whole thing becomes a lot more sinister.
The central mystery is okay, the whodunnit’s a little predictable but whatever, the influencers are suitably horrible and the auxiliary characters are great; Wilde’s unrelated matriarch Hester Crimsteen is always fun, and so is his adoptive sister Rola. But I’m knocking off a star for the paper-thin ending. It’s weirdly tacked on, like Coben refused to give his editor what he wanted, so the editor asked someone else to write it. It ties things up a little too conveniently and gleefully skips over a few plot holes, which are dismissed with a “it’s probably nothing” and “he didn’t want to worry about that.” It’s a cheap ending to an otherwise pretty okay thriller.