Children go missing: the latest crime fiction reviewed

Hot on the heels of The Stranger, the Netflix series based on his novel but transplanted to the UK, Harlan Coben returns with his 32nd book. Some of us have been getting our regular dose ever since he introduced his sports agent sleuth Myron Bolitar in the mid-1990s, and The Boy from the Woods (Century, £20) contains all the usual ingredients.

For those new to Coben it has the virtues of The Stranger — addictive and full of twists, with an intriguing premise. It also has its deficiencies: too many subplots, a tendency to drop promising strands of the story when something else comes along, and characters whose motives are often unclear and whose behaviour is downright far-fetched.

The boy of the title, discovered as a feral child in the forest, is the hook sold to us on the cover. But in fact we find out nothing about that; it is merely an excuse to present us with Wilde, now an adult, ex-special forces, with heightened powers of intuition and survival and perhaps a bit too good to be true.

He is enlisted by the more satisfactory Hester Crimstein (from Run Away), a no-nonsense septuagenarian lawyer with her own TV show, to track down a classmate of her grandson’s who may have been kidnapped. Conveniently, Wilde, her late son’s best childhood friend, is godfather to the boy, and begins to put his talents to use uncovering what has happened. The plot’s twists and reversals involve murky pasts, school bullies, detached parents, rich TV producers, sinister security consultants, fake internet news and a politician reminiscent of Steve Bannon. It’s all highly entertaining, if occasionally preposterous.

A missing child is also central to Magpie Lane (Quercus, £16.99), though Lucy Atkins adopts a very different approach.