Hooray for Sainsbury's. Or Sainsbury's ebooks, anyway. They are very kindly sending me credits in return for reviews, and as I'd very much enjoyed the Harlan Coben I read about a month ago, I couldn't resist this, his latest. And I really liked it.
As you know, I read a lot of crime. But I don't read it for the violence or the blood, both of which I rather recoil from. I read it for the mystery. That's why I love Sophie Hannah's books so much -- she sets you up at the beginning with an impossible situation, and you just have to keep reading to see how on earth she will explain it. And that's pretty much was happens in The Stranger.
The stranger didn't shatter Adam's world all at once. That was what Adam would tell himself later, but that was a lie. Adam somehow knew right away, right from the very first sentence, that the life he had known as a content suburban married father of two was forever gone. It was a simple sentence on the face of it, but there was something in the tone, something knowing and even caring, that let Adam know that nothing would ever be the same.
'You didn't have to stay with her', the stranger said.
So who is the mysterious stranger, and how does he know so much about Adam and his family -- more, much more, than Adam knows himself? Once the disturbing secret has been revealed, and Adam, who is a lawyer, has done enough investigation to know that the stranger's claims are true, all his beliefs and certainties are completely undermined.
So yes, this is a novel about shattering the American dream, an old old story, you might think. But Coben does it with great sensitivity, depicting the relationship between Adam and his two teenage sons in a way that is wholly believable and extremely touching. Adam is a good man forced to behave in ways that are completely out of character, and uncovering more and more disturbing secrets as he goes along. Certainly neither he nor the boys will ever be the same again, but by the end they have come through and you are left with a feeling of optimism for whatever their futures may bring.
There are twists and turns all the way through the novel, red herrings galore, and some extremely odd revelations underpin the central mystery. Cyber crime features heavily -- when does it not, in contemporary crime novels these day? I'm not sure how entirely convincing the final revelations were -- this is often the trouble, and happens with Sophie Hannah too -- the more impossible the initial situation, the trickier it is to find a plausible solution. But you know what? I didn't care in the least. It was a real page turner (or page flicker, if like me you are reading it as an ebook) and I whizzed through it with great pleasure.
