The Stranger, by Harlan Coben

“The stranger didn’t shatter Adam’s world all at once. That was what Adam Price would tell himself later, but that was a lie. Right from the very first sentence, Adam somehow knew right away that the life he had known as a content suburban married father of two was forever gone.”

“We’re living the dream,” Tripp Evans tells Adam Price at their sons’ sixth-grade lacrosse all-star team draft. But it had already started to slip when a stranger approached Adam minutes before and told him a dark secret about his wife, Corinne, adding, “you didn’t have to stay with her.” It appears that the stranger had no motive for telling Adam this.

When he confronts Corinne she doesn’t know, but now she is leaving a text message saying, “YOU TAKE CARE OF THE KIDS. DON’T TRY TO CONTACT ME. IT WILL BE OKAY.”

Corinne refuses to answer Adams’s question, saying, “there is more to this story.” Well, that is precisely right, and it is a well-written story that you won’t want to put down.

More about Harlan Coben on the Favorite Author Page

Harlan Coben has a reported net worth of 25 million and is also credited with the comment that only bad writers think they are good. He is indeed a good writer, and his books are ones you can’t put down. For more on this author, see the Favorite Author Page for him.

Quotes

“but every home is its island with its secrets.” 

“the cardinal rule: You never have to take back words you don’t say.” 

“We get mad at someone for cutting us off in traffic, taking too long to order at Starbucks, or not responding exactly as we see fit, and we have no idea that behind their facade, they may be dealing with some industrial-strength shit. Their lives may be in pieces. They may be amid incalculable tragedy and turmoil, and they may be hanging on to their sanity by a thread.”

“I said everyone looks happy. That was kind of my point. If you judge the world by Facebook, you wonder why so many people take Prozac.”