Book Review: Missing You

Spoilers!

There are some authors where no matter how big the book is — I’m thinking typically more than 400 pages in a mass market paperback edition — I will devour it in a matter of hours. Karin Slaughter. Lee Child. Jeffery Deaver. And Harlan Coben. To name a few. Coben is so good at crafting a mystery with a few threads you’re eager to unspool and he agonizingly teases you along. You gotta know! Hence, the mania around completing his books quickly. My most recent Coben read is his 2014 book (and apparently, now a Netflix TV series), Missing You. NYPD detective Kat Donovan, in her 40s, is set-up by her friend on a dating website. The friend has the good intentions of helping her find love. Instead, that one effort starts a chain of events that leads to uncovered family secrets, kidnapping, extortion, murder, and ultimately, the past becoming present becoming past again for Kat.

Kat’s father, also a NYD detective, was murdered ostensibly by a hitman hired by a gang member. Ostensibly because Kat has her doubts. When the hitman is on his deathbed, Kat hopes to receive clear confirmation, a confession, out of him. Instead, he seems to indicate he had nothing to do with the murder. He only took the fall for it because he was already going down for two other murders. Meanwhile, Brandon, a 19 year old from Connecticut, believes his mother, Dana, who is a widower, is missing. She ostensibly (that word again!) went on a date with a new man she met online, but hasn’t checked in with Brandon. Kat, naturally, is skeptical foul play as is afoot, and is also wondering why Brandon came to her and how he knows about her. That’s because of the third item, the aforementioned dating website. Brandon hacked into the website and came across Kat’s profile. But also, that Kat was interacting with the same man who took Dana on an out-of-town date. That man? Jeff, under the new name of Ron, was her fiancé 18 years ago. For unknown reasons, he broke the engagement off with Kat and he hasn’t spoken to her since. When Kat, Brandon, and her best friend try to research what Jeff, or Ron, have been doing the past 18 years, they find scant information. Suspicious to find hardly a digital footprint in the digital age. But they don’t know what it fully means yet.

So, that’s the table-setting. All the moving pieces here involve a mystery behind our main protagonist’s father’s death; a son who believes something has happened to his mother and his efforts to convince Kat of that; and Kat’s former fiancé popping back up into her life. When I’m reading a book and see disparate elements like this, I always assume in some form or fashion, the author is going to bring them together or there will be overlap of some sort, which makes my head start rattling off potential twists and turns. At first, I thought Captain Stagger, Kat’s superior and her father’s former partner, may have killed the father since he met the hitman in prison one day after his arrest. That’s suspicious. Lingering in my head, though, with no evidence yet, mind you (only that Coben introduced the plot thread!), was that Jeff had something to do with Kat’s dad’s death. Why else would he disappear around the same time of her dad’s murder? More on that situation in a moment.

While Kat tries to uncover the mysteries surrounding her dad and Jeff, she’s also working Dana’s alleged disappearance. Helpfully, Coben makes it clear that Dana has been kidnapped. We get a window into the thinking of the culprits, Titus and his righthand henchman, Reynaldo. Titus started as a regular pimp running prostitutes (and coercing women into it as well) in NYC and then decided to become more sly and profitable with his operations. He erected an entire catfishing operation via dating websites, websites like the one Kat and Jeff are on. Through fake profiles, he and his team preyed upon middle-aged men and women looking for love. He’d lure them in, and when it was time to meet in-person for the first time, instead they were kidnapped and taken to a former Amish farmhouse in the middle of Pennsylvania. There, they’d be kept in a box underground, barely fed and given water, and they only exited the box to either be extorted for their monies or killed once “bled dry,” as Titus puts it. They used the digital world to make it seem like nothing was amiss (fake emails and texts), and they only tried to take people who had few family members to miss them. Again, luckily for Dana, Brandon was persistent in his claims that Dana was missing. It took a lot of starting-and-stopping for Kat to take it seriously, but the circumstantial evidence began piling up. Her chauvinistic partner, Chaz, turned out to be useful and helpful in tracking down leads as well.

Titus’ catfishing scheme then overlapped with the mystery of Jeff: Titus was using Jeff’s scant digital footprint as the perfect catfishing profile. In other words, when Kat communicated early on in the book with “Jeff” via the website, it wasn’t Jeff at all but Titus pretending to be him. The Jeff profile was used to lure Dana and other women. Nonetheless, Kat is able to track down the real Jeff/Ron. Is this going to be the fairytale ending Kat’s best friend promised? Can they rekindle what they had 18 years previously? Sure Jeff has a child from another woman who died now, and Kat still doesn’t know why he ended their engagement, but to use the cliche, does time heal all wounds? Before Kat can even entertain the possibility, she first begins unraveling the truth of her father’s life and death. She learns from neighborhood gossip that her father was seeing a Black prostitute named “Sugar.” She assumes this is a woman. At some point early on in the book, Kat makes offhanded reference to her father being a “loveable bigot” the way he talked about gays and other minorities. Turns out, her father was a closeted, and certainly, self-hating, homosexual. Despite the self-hate, he carried on this relationship with Sugar, who is a man, obviously. As the story goes, the mob boss learns of this affair and Kat’s dad’s true identity and uses it as leverage. That is, until her dad stops playing ball. That’s when the now-dead hitman kills her father. It’s all falling into place. Seemingly.

My only frustration with that story thread being “resolved” is that the meeting between Kat and Sugar where she learns of this takes place in the heat of her working the case of Dana’s disappearance. Because Coben switches back-and-forth from Kat’s perspective to what’s happening on the farm from the perspectives of Titus, Reynaldo, and eventually, Dana, we know that Dana is in imminent peril of being killed. She’s been “bled dry.” And is becoming a liability because Titus somehow learns that Kat is investigating the money transactions. He’s spooked. So, I want Kat on that trail to ensure Dana’s survival, but she pivots to this conversation with Sugar and then follows up with Captain Stagger about it instead. Focus, Kat! I know your personal life is in upheaval, but lives are at stake! But I digress. Thankfully for Dana’s sake, she’s a fighter and a survivor. She manages to evade Reynaldo, escape in the woods, circle back to the farmhouse (where Titus left to come to NYC to kill Kat and then decides to kidnap Brandon instead), and kills Titus’ digital guru with an ax. She’s able to also warn Brandon, which gives Kat enough time to track Titus’ car all the way back to the farmhouse. The bad-ass that she is, Dana escapes Reynaldo again when he burns the farmhouse down and also helps the seven other people in the underground boxes escape. At the farmhouse, Titus shoots Brandon in the knee to draw Dana out. Kat is able to intervene and nearly kill Titus. The seven survivors then attack Reynaldo, with Dana satisfyingly providing the death blow with an ax. Go, Dana!

Soooo, time for that fairytale ending? After learning about her dad and the sadness she feels that he couldn’t live his true identity and love as he wanted to love, Kat convinces herself that reuniting with Jeff is a matter of fate and indeed, a fairytale of a kind. Jeff’s story is rather farfetched and if she didn’t have rose-colored glasses on, Kat probably would have thought the same. He explains that he was in a bar fight in Cincinnati and the guy he fought was mobbed up, so he essentially went into hiding. That’s why he broke off the engagement with Kat, and then he had a drunken one-night stand with a woman that produced their child he now has. Regardless, Kat and Jeff are an item and it lasts for about a blissful month. But in the remaining pages of the book, Coben has one last thread to wrap up: There were, as yet, unknown fingerprints at her dad’s crime scene. The former detective who worked the case calls Kat because the fingerprints came back to a match. Jeff! I knew it! Ah! What happened was, in one of his self-hating rages, Kat’s dad stumbled upon Aqua, Kat’s gay Black best friend, and was assaulting him. Aqua was Jeff’s best friend, too, and roommate. When Jeff came upon the assault, he tried to stop it. The ensuing melee led to Jeff shooting and killing Kat’s dad. Stagger, who didn’t want any of this coming out, helped Jeff cover it up and then convinced the hitman to take the fall for it, hence the prison visit. In other words, Stagger was still lying to her, and Jeff, obviously, not only lied to her back then and in the present day, but killed her dad. Even so, Coben weirdly ends the book with them maybe going to make it work anyway?! What?! No, seriously. The book ends with Jeff sitting on the bed next to Kat and his hand moving toward hers and hers toward his. I’m not sure I like that. The namesake of the book was based on the John Waite song, “Missing You”:

Perhaps that longing is enough for Kat? I don’t know.

Like I said, though, Coben did it again. His books are fun mysteries that make me insatiably read them to find out what is going on and how those disparate pieces are going to come together. I’ve also criticized Coben in the past for sometimes being too sarcastic in his books and dialogue. Here, I thought he was more reserved and it’s for the better. Also, I wouldn’t mind being in Kat’s head again; she was a great main character. But so were Dana and Brandon. Their stubbornness (love as mother-son!) was endearing. If you’re a Coben fan, you’ll enjoy this standalone book, too.