Caught by Harlan Coben

June 29, 2012, South Amboy, NJ.

Paperback 2011, 438 pages.

I am writing this blog about a week after I finished the book, so the plots are a bit fuzzy, especially since I read most of it inside a plane (Hong Kong to Chicago), in that state of neither being awake nor asleep.

There are several different plot lines that somehow intersect with one another.  The main one, probably, is this group at Princeton University students whose prank resulted in the disfiguring of a woman.  The one who volunteered to take the blame eventually tried to get even, one result of which was framing Dan Mercer as a pedophile.  This resulted in Mercer being killed by Ed Grayson, a victim's father.  Turns out the one who committed the crime was Grayson's brother-in-law.   And, it turns out, Mercer was indeed guilty of murdering a young girl.

All the twists and resolution are in the final pages of the book.  It felt as if the author was trying frantically to tie up all the loose ends and did only a so-so job of it.  On top of that, he has a habit of taking the reader through a character's thinking process, resulting in a page of words where a sentence would do.  And in most cases the reader probably doesn't care about how the characters think.

Overall, the book is an easy read, and I would rate it average, even though I find the plot a bit convoluted, and the ending unsatisfactory.