Harlan Cohen has been one of my favorite authors! I always know when I pick up one his books I will enjoy it. This book did not disappoint. The actual boy from the woods is grown man in this mystery. The end did leave me wanting more. I hope that this is a first in series!

The boy from the woods is now man. A man with many sides. Now known as Wilde, he was found at a young age in the woods surviving on pure "woods smart". How did he get there and how did he survive? Upon his "rescue" he had to adapt to society. He is a neat freak, chaos undoes him. He is unable to connect and does well alone. As a man, he lives in the Appalachian woods and his in partnership with is foster sister in security. When his god son Matthew informs his powerful attorney grandmother Hester of his concern for a missing student, Hester and Wilde work together to find her. In searching for her they land in a political pull and end up in the swamp. A student that is bullied by the son of a famous documentary producer with political ties. When their son goes missing, the true nature of political war comes out. A us vs them for political power builds as right and wrong doesn't matter.


The characters relationship with each other makes this prose different from other Coben's thrillers. The past they shared and the respect for each other compared to their counter-parts, the political powers that be. The pull for Wilde to know his roots and how that worked in finding his god's son missing friends. Many ironies and surprises. Just how I like it.

A Special Thank you to Grand Central Publishing and Netgalley for the ARC and the opportunity to post an honest review

This Harlan Coben book was highly anticipated as I have been a long time reader and enjoy his books immensely. Lots of intrigue and likable characters in this one. However, I didn't feel like the character of Wilde and his relationship with David, or David's accident was fully explained. We just got glimpses of WIlde's life in the woods and nothing was told about the accident. We buy all Harlan Coben books at my library, so I do not have to recommend it, he is very popular here.

Harlan Coben, always traps you with his writing style, Fast paced thriller with a few twists and turns along the way...

Harlan Coben’s The Boy from the Woods is one of his fresher – and angrier – books in awhile. He’s using lawyer Hester Crimstein as his main character (mostly), and as readers, we get some of the fierce Hester’s backstory, as she listens to her grandson when he tells her he’s worried about the disappearance of a bullied girl in his class.

There’s also the titular character, the “boy from the woods,” aka Wilde, a man who was discovered as a 6 or 8 year old in the woods, apparently having survived living on his own for quite a while. He learned English from breaking into abandoned homes and watching television but as a grown man, he’s still most comfortable alone in the woods.

On top of that is the typical crackerjack Coben plot machine, and really, there’s no one better at telling a compelling story than Harlan Coben. He has elements he loves to rely on and successfully revisits them, but his ability to put together a plot that packs both suspense and emotion into one power driven read is unmatched. He’s one of the narrative geniuses of our time.

This was a rare book that, for Coben, had a political edge as he takes on a Trump like figure and exposes the cracks behind the glossy façade. That’s the true mystery/suspense part of the story. The emotional heart lies with Wilde, Hester, and the horror of the daily bullying endured by the missing girl. Coben is also practically unmatched (perhaps Megan Abbott would be closest, though she has a darker take) at vivisecting the world of high school social mores.

This was a fabulous, unputdownable, as well as memorable, read.

Although I sometimes got lost in the woods while reading chapters, Harlan Coben's signature style emerged and I was swept away by the mystery. Readers will find themselves second guessing motives, the truth behind facades and after discovering the plot, another twist will be revealed.

I thank the publisher for an early copy and promised a truthful review. While this one wasn't my favorite Coben, it captured my attention and kept me reading past midnight.

The Boy From the Woods is Harlan Coben’s latest thriller, and will likely be another very successful thriller. The story has several threads throughout…all related, and all done well. Naomi Pine is a miserable teenager who is mocked and bullied relentlessly by her classmates. She is a complete outcast who dreams of fitting in with the more popular kids. One of those kids, Matthew, is worried when she disappears, and fears he and the popular rich kid Crash (yes, really) bear some responsibility for her disappearance. He asks his grandmother, the awesome criminal defense attorney and TV star Hester Crimstein (who has appeared in several of Coben’s previous books), for help.

Hester’s son David died as a teenager in a car accident, after becoming friends with the aptly named Wilde, who was found as a feral child living in the woods thirty years ago. Their bond resulted in Wilde being sort of a surrogate father to Matthew following David’s death and his own adventures at West Point and working in various special ops positions prior to forming his own detective agency. Wilde also has an on-again, off-again “friends with benefits” relationship with Matthew’s mom Laila, who is a beautiful and brainy African-American attorney.

Wilde relates to Naomi, a fellow outcast, and agrees to help Hester help Matthew help Naomi (still with me? It actually flows fine in the book). Wilde’s search for Naomi takes him back to the town where he grew up, a town that is full of secrets that have been protecting the rich and powerful, including that kid Crash’s parents, Dash (yes, really) and Delia Maynard.

Dash (basically the Mark Burnett character) is a creator of TV shows and characters. One of those characters is Rusty Eggers (the Trump character), “…a talk show guru with a sketchy background”, a “fake entity” now running a “disruptive Presidential campaign,” believing that the system in America is broken, and “…the only way to fix it is to first upend it.” There are a ton of parallels with the current reality we live in, exemplified by Rusty’s reference to Werner Herzog, the German film director who “…said that America was waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of our people will kill one-third of our people while one-third of our people watches.”

The various threads are interwoven successfully at a fairly fast pace, and while there are connections with other of Coben’s stories and characters, this is totally a standalone novel. The Wilde character’s story requires some willing suspension of disbelief, and the twist at the end and the resolution didn’t totally work for me…but I really enjoyed the experience of reading it. Four stars (might have been five with a different ending, but I can’t imagine what that might have been). Thanks to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for this honest review.

Well I’ll definitely be in the minority with this opinion, but I didn’t love this book. I actually felt bored through most of it and that’s hard for me to say because Harlan Coben is one of my very favorite writers and Run Away (last year’s book) was a 5 star read for me. This story centers on Wilde, the boy from the woods who was rescued as a child and is now in his 30s. He’s currently still living in the woods but in a eco pod and keeps close contact with his best friend’s wife and son (said friend died years earlier in a car crash) as well as with famous criminal defense lawyer Hester Crimstein. The mystery involves the disappearance of a local teenage girl who was kind of a friend of Matthew, Hester’s Gradson, and he asks his grandma to look into her disappearance. She enlists Wilde’s help. Here’s where the start of my issues began - I didn’t care about the teenage girl - why she left or was taken or if she returned - and this lack of care greatly decreased my enjoyment. There’s also a parallel plot occurring involving a local wealthy family and their badly behaving teenage son - was he involved? What are those parents hiding? Again, I didn’t really care. What I did enjoy was the fantastic dialogue which Coben is a master of, along with witty one liners and banter between Hester and just about everyone. This wasn’t enough to save the story for me and I often found myself skimming. The end was interesting and I can’t say I saw it coming but it wasn’t shocking by any means. This is a case of love the author just didn’t love the latest book but I’ll for sure to continue to read Coben’s future releases.

The Boy from the Woods by Harlan Coben has a fast paced plot with unique and reliable characters, A suspense thriller with a multitude of unpredictable twists and turns leading to a surprising conclusion. The title of the book doesn't pertain the story other than being one of the characters. The story is so much more.

Thank you to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for the opportunity to preview the book.

When it comes to timely reading of pre-publication books I get by way of NetGalley, I try to play it straight - really, I do - by reading them in order of next to be released. But sometimes I get one I'm so excited about that it jumps to the head of the line. This is one of those times. And to the half-dozen books that got pushed aside, I promise to get to them soon, but love means never having to say you're sorry. This one was way too good for apologies.

It's most notable to me for the interesting characters, starting with Wilde, a now-grown man who, as a young boy, was found living in a state forest. He had no memory of a family, or how he got there, curiously attributing his language ability to sneaking into people's homes when they were gone to watch TV shows like Sesame Street and videos (how he learned to turn them on remains a mystery to me, but hey). Also important to this story is attorney Hester Crimstein, a somewhat quirky but very likable character who has appeared in previous books.

At this stage of his life, Wilde has become quite accomplished, having graduated from West Point and served in the military, but he remains somewhat reclusive and continues to live in the forest in an eco-friendly but technologically advanced pod-like structure that can be moved around at will. He has no real emotional attachment to anyone and prefers living alone - how he survived communal living at West Point and the military is beyond me, but I'm guessing it wasn't the most fun he ever had in his life. But back in the woods, he manages to collect a menagerie of former and current ladies. More to the point here, he was good friends with Hester's late son, David (and, of course, with Hester).

A young girl named Naomi Pines, a victim of bullying at school, goes missing, and her off-and-on classmate, Matthew (Hester's grandson) is so worried that he begs her to look into her disappearance. When Hester asks viewers of her popular TV show to be on the lookout for Naomi, all heck seems to break loose. Much of that emanates from the wealthy and powerful parents of one of the boys who bullied Naomi unmercifully (exactly why school teachers and officials always looked the other way when that happened isn't clear, but I suppose it has something to do with not wanting to get on the wrong side of those snooty parents).

Of course, there's a subplot that involves goings-on and the potential for blackmail among the aforementioned filthy rich parents and their friends, one of whom is making a run for a major political office. And that leads to some political commentary which, I presume, reflects the author's opinions (and certainly mine), to-wit: "The middle class has become complacent. They are smart, but they are lazy. They see the grays, they get the other side. Extremists, on the other hand, see only black and white. They are not only certain that their vision is absolutely correct, but they are incapable of even understanding the other side. Those who don't believe as they do are lesser in every way...They don't see right or wrong - they see us and them."

Aided by some old friends, Wilde ratchets up his investigative skills to find Naomi; and when another youth goes missing and the plot thickens, they tackle that as well - sometimes at their own peril. All in all, it's a sometimes harrowing experience for the characters and a whirlwind for readers - at least for me. Loved it - many thanks for the opportunity to read and review it.

The Boy from the Woods by bestselling author, Harlan Coben, is a bit different from the norm, but no less fascinating. He takes the mystery of a boy who is found in the woods with no hint of his origins, and fast forwards to 30 years later where the grown boy, known as Wilde, helps find a missing teenager who attends school with Hester Crimstein’s grandson, Matthew. Hester is a minor character from Coben’s previous books – she is a tough attorney, and since she was a neighbor (before selling her home to her son and daughter-in-law) to the mega-wealthy Maynards, who are key players in this novel, is hired to represent them. Coben inserts phrases from previous novels that readers who haven’t read them won’t understand, i.e., Crimstein answers the phone with “articulate.” This means nothing to first-time readers, but plenty to those who are die-hard fans and have read everything from this prolific author.

The Boy from the Woods holds several mysteries, and the teenage girl who is missing, Naomi Pine, is one who has been bullied in school by those who are part of the popular clique. Matthew, whose father was killed in an automobile accident ten years prior, is part of that clique, but he is worried about her and isn’t one of them who is guilty of bullying.

Coben is a master storyteller, evidenced by the fact that he is one of the top bestselling thriller authors in modern literature. This novel, is no exception, but doesn’t include the obligatory dead body in the beginning. Because Crimstein hasn’t been a key character in previous novels, Coben does an excellent job of developing her into a likeable, tough player, and her role in solving the mysteries of the novel is significant. Readers will probably hear from her again, as well as Wilde, since his origins aren’t clear and it is a mystery needing answers.

Since Coben is a favorite author of many, this novel is highly recommended. It’s well-written, and has enough mystery to keep readers interested.

Special thanks to NetGalley for supplying a review copy of this book.

EXCELLENT work by an old master of the suspense novel. This feels like a classic 90’s thriller, with overarching plotlines that fit together in the end. I enjoyed it.

Harlan Coben is a master of suspense. His books are like a game of 'which shell is the pea under'. You have to pay close attention to multiple storylines within the main bombshell plot. And this one has my favorite character, Hester Crimstein. 

Thirty years ago Hester discovered that her son, David had an imaginary friend at the edge of the woods. Only he wasn't imaginary. He was a real boy, living in the woods with no name, no identification, nothing. Named Wilde, he is still a mystery even to himself.

When a local girl goes missing, the famous and oh so wonderful lawyer, Hester Crimstein, asks Wilde to use his skills to help find her. In doing so he finds that everyone is lying. Everyone is keeping secrets. Secrets that someone will kill to keep quiet. Is the missing girl part of some high school game or something more sinister?

An edge of your seat thriller with an ending I never saw coming. But it was a very satisfying one!

NetGalley/ March 17th, 2020 by Grand Central Publishing

I’m a huge Harlan Coben fan in everything he produces; adult books, YA books and Netflix series. Over the length of his long career everything he’s written is consistently top notch, and I’ve never been disappointed. So for me it’s really saying something that this is my favorite book he’s written.
Introduced in this novel is a new character, Wilde, who raised himself in the woods until he was found around the age of 8. Wilde became best friends with Hester Crimstein’s son, and subsequently with her sons wife and child.
Hester’s grandchild, Matthew comes to her with a problem, a girl who is constantly being bullied is missing and he’s worried. Hester involves Wilde, and together they try to find out what’s happened.
Top notch lawyer Hester Crimstein is a wonderful character who’s been in multiple Coben books. What makes this book special is Coben really delves into her character and personality, and she has a softer side that’s never been revealed before. And I’m crazy about her, she has so much depth and personality. Wilde is an unusual character as well, a man who served in special forces, integrated into society, but he still prefers his solitude and the woods. I’m hoping Coben writes more books with them together and we’re able to continue watching theses characters grow.
Once you pick up The Boy From the Woods put everything else aside and immerse yourself in this compelling and wonderful story.

I've been a fan of Harlan Coben for years and was thrilled to be granted an arc by netgalley in exchange for my honest opinion. Yet again, Coben grabbed my interest from the start and kept it right on through the story. He created some complicated and enjoyable characters in this mystery story. There were many layers and twists that made this a quick and thoughtful read. I really enjoyed the story and I hope that Coben revisits the characters of Wilde and Hester!

A new book from Harlan Coben is always like a visit from a good friend. He delivers yet again with his latest, "The Boy From The Woods," which grips you from the get-go and doesn't let go! (And when it's over, you don't want it to let go.) Certainly a one- or two-sitting read, because you won't want to be away from it for long!

If I had to give Harlan Coben an award, it would be "best books to read on an airplane." They're fast-paced, easy to read, and have enough action that you can follow it even when you're a little distracted by everything going on around you. The Boy from the Woods fits this perfectly. I guess my problem was that I read this book sitting at home, and I didn't have airplane ambiance to distract me from over-analyzing it.
The Boy from the Woods follows Wilde, a man who was found living alone in the woods when he was a boy. The perspective switches back and forth between Wilde and Hester Crimstein, a defense attorney with a TV show, who readers might remember as a side character in Run Away. A young girl named Naomi Pine goes missing, and since she goes to school with Matthew (Hester's grandson and Wilde's godson) everybody gets all up in the mystery.
Reading this book, I thought a lot about Chekov's gun. Or in this case, Chekov's title. This book is not about a boy from the woods, not really. There's some discussion of Wilde's backstory, but it isn't satisfying. Wilde is a super-paranoid, former-military survivalist, and we're supposed to accept that this is because he was a foundling. It seemed like a stretch to me, but I don't know a lot of foundlings so maybe I'm wrong. And in the end, the book isn't really about the missing Naomi Pine either. In the interest of a spoiler-free review, I won't say more, but I think I would have liked this book more if the title and the synopsis actually reflected the story we got. There's about a hundred side stories in the Boy from the Woods and they do all come together, but I really just wanted to know more about the promised boy from the woods.
Recommended for fans of Harlan Coben, red herrings, and/or thrillers with complicated plots. Thanks to the published and NetGalley for an arc of the book.

I just finished The Boy from The Woods by Harlan Coben. It ended up being much better than what I expected b based on the description - it was not a Tarzan-type book about a boy raised by wolves! The characters were enjoyable and the plot was entertaining, though perhaps not the best title from this author. It reminded me a lot of his last book Run Away. I particularly liked one character, Hester, because she came across as a feisty old lady. #goHester.

Harlan Cohen never disappoints. His fast-paced, page turning thrillers always keep me reading late into the night. The Boy From the Woods is no exception. With fully developed characters, short action filled chapters, and unexpected twists I blew through this book in less than a day. Highly recommended.

Once again an absolutely great book. I loved the interaction between Wilde and Hester. Also the interaction between Hester and Oren. Plenty of surprises all through the book. The ending was a real surprise. Thank you Harlan for another great book.