The Boy from the Woods Review

Title: The Boy from the Woods
Author: Harlan Coben
Type: Mystery
Pages: 371
Rating: 3/5
“Extremists are relentless. They don’t see right or wrong. They see us and them”
In the story a girl named Naomi goes missing but nobody seems to care much except a boy named Matthew from her school. She comes back, saying it was all a joke. Then a week later it seems like she is missing for real this time but maybe she just ran away or maybe she’s just joking around again. Of course when a rich privileged dude named Crash goes missing it gets more attention. There’s a ransom note with his disappearance. They are demanding tapes be released from a political candidate that would show some damaging things in order for Crash to be released. The boy from the woods, named Wilde, seems to want to solve this big mystery. In the end he figures it all out pretty easily.
This story was just ok for me. I feel like the first 1/3 was really fast paced, the next 1/3 was slow and then the last 1/3 was fast. There were a lot of characters that were introduced and they were hard to keep track of. I feel like there was so much going on in this story too, lots of different subplots. The idea of this mystery boy appearing from the woods was neat but that storyline didn’t really go anywhere and honestly could have been left out. The author also obviously got some of his ideas from our current political climate which was a little amusing. At the end of the story I found myself saying ‘that’s it?’ Overall this was just meh.