I think I always knew that this place, this horrible place, was his secret destination. Most Saturdays he would pretend to be going on fishing trips, but I never really believed that. This is the first time I've spied on him like this.
The tears cascade down his face in a freefall. I have never seen my father cry before not when his own father died, not when my mother ran off and left us, not even when he first heard about my sister, Camille. He does it with a fury, as though the ground has angered him and he is seeking vengeance. I am eighteen years old, and this is my most vivid memory of my father him, in the woods, with that shovel. The blade rips into the earth like it's wet flesh. He raises the shovel up and strikes the ground. An awful, guttural sob forces its way up from deep in his lungs and out through his lips. Nevertheless, few readers will remain unaffected by its emotional heft. Only the Washington Post faulted the novel's cheap thrills, improbable revelations, and awkward conclusion. The trial scenes, Cope's ruminations on what really happened that night, and the back-and-forth narration are particularly well done. A few critics noted that while The Woods falls into Coben's typical formula-a past crime affects innocent people in the present-it still comes off as fresh. In this stand-alone legal thriller, Harlan Coben presents a riveting courtroom drama, creates riveting players, and delves into family secrets, love, loss, mistakes, and betrayal. Hopefully, Coben will return to form with his next book. Less than compelling characters fail to compensate for a host of implausibilities. Cope's own actions on that night again come under scrutiny, even as the highly placed fathers of the men he's prosecuting work to unearth as many skeletons as possible to pressure him into dropping the rape case. Cope's intense focus on a high-profile rape prosecution of some wealthy college students shifts after one of the Slasher's victims, whose body was never found, turns up as a recent corpse in Manhattan, casting doubt on the official theory of the old case. At the start of this disappointing stand-alone from bestseller Coben (Promise Me), Paul "Cope" Copeland, acting county prosecutor for Essex County, N.J., and Lucy Gold, his long-lost summer camp love, are still haunted by a fateful night, decades earlier, when their nighttime tryst allowed some younger campers, including Cope's sister, to venture into the nearby forest, where they apparently fell victim to the Summer Slasher, a serial killer.
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