Tell No One
Harlan Coben
Winner of the Crime Thriller Hound’s Book of the Year for 2001.
For Dr. David Beck, the loss was shattering. And every day for the past eight years, he has relived the horror of what happened. The gleaming lake. The pale moonlight. The piercing screams. The night his wife was taken. The last night he saw her alive.
Everyone tells him it's time to move on, to forget the past once and for all. But for David Beck, there can be no closure. A message has appeared on his computer, a phrase only he and his dead wife know. Suddenly Beck is taunted with the impossible—that somewhere, somehow, Elizabeth is alive.
Beck has been warned to tell no one. And he doesn't. Instead, he runs from the people he trusts the most, plunging headlong into a search for the shadowy figure whose messages hold out a desperate hope.
But already Beck is being hunted down. He's headed straight into the heart of a dark and deadly secret—and someone intends to stop him before he gets there.
David Beck and his childhood sweetheart Elizabeth are on vacation when he is knocked unconscious in a brutal attack that sees Elizabeth being murdered, supposedly by a serial killer called KillRoy.
Eight years later and David Beck has rebuilt his life. He’s finished med-school and become a paediatrician working with ghetto kids in Manhattan. Then a mysterious e-mail arrives on the anniversary of their first kiss: a message and image that leads David to wonder if Elizabeth could still be alive. Desperate to shed light on her disappearance, David follows the order to ‘tell no one’ but for how long? Out on his own, suspicions turn on him as powerful sources are prepared to destroy him in order to keep their secrets.
David is a likable lead, typical of Coben’s stand-alones (of which this is his first), he’s an everyman in an extraordinary situation. The love and loss he feels for Elizabeth makes the reader feel for his frantic plight.
The hook is a powerful one, and the twists and tension keeps up in this brilliant page-tuner.
TELL NO ONE has been turned into the commercial and critical smash hit French film of the same name, starring Francois Cluzet and Kristin Scott Thomas. The movie was the top box office foreign-language film of the year in USA, won the Lumiere (French Golden Globe) for best picture and was nominated for nine Cesars (French Oscar) and won four, including best actor, best director and best music. Look out for the Hollywood remake.
About Harlan Coben:
Coben was born in Newark, New Jersey, the state in which he still lives.
After graduating from Amherst College a political science major, Harlan worked in the travel industry.
The first author to win the Edgar Award, Shamus Award and Anthony Award. His best-known series feature the sports agent Myron Bolitar. A series for young adults features Myron’s nephew Mickey.