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.