The more I read Harlan Coben, the more I get his style of writing.  It’s a lot of fun to read and I enjoy the books immensely. It’s just a feeling that I know how he’s going to sensationalize certain aspects of the story to create drama before I even get there.

That said, Caught managed to surprise me a great deal.

The story begins simply enough. A do-gooder social worker who works with inner-city youths in New Jersey is seemingly caught in the act by a reporter who makes a living exposing pedophiles who prey on disaffected youth.  Dan Mercer seemed to be too good to be true until Wendy Tynes somehow gets information that he’s about to be arrested and manages to cover him being informed of this live.  Dan doesn’t have much in terms of family and friends, save for the youth he works with and an ex-wife he’s remained pretty close to.

At first, Wendy doesn’t buy his protest that he’s innocent.  As she starts to take a harder look at a few things, though, something doesn’t seem right.  Just as she’s starting to believe she might have set up an innocent man (and one who’s now dead, at that) a piece of evidence turns up that connects Dan to another case and throws everything into turmoil.

Confused? Really, I’ve told you too much already.

Caught is good simply because instead of things making more and more sense as the story went on, they made less and less.  Events take place, things are revealed, and evidence turns up that made me go “What?” Everything I thought I knew throughout the story got turned on its head on a regular basis.  There were twists and turns aplenty that weren’t predictable in the least.  This made for a good read that (mostly) works quite well.

For the scenario Coben sets up to work, there are certain things that have to take place, and there are times that it just doesn’t seem too likely that everything would have worked out just like this.  He ties everything up nicely in the end and if I didn’t think about it too much, it’s fine.  I might believe some of the relationships of who knew who in a small town like where I live, but in New Jersey where there are millions of people squeezed into a relatively small tract of land, it becomes hard to swallow some of the coincidences that turn up; and those coincidences are important to making Coben’s story work.

That said, the story is still a fantastic page-turner.  There’s plenty of action and intrigue as Wendy tries to learn the truth of what happened, rather than just the facts as she saw them with her own eyes.  Nothing is as it seems, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading Caught despite some of the issues I took with it.