This works well as a gripping piece of popular fiction. I had to keep reading to find out what happened, but aside from that I didn't feel I got much out of it. It was a little too violent for my tastes, and didn't have the additional thoughtfulness that I like to see even in entertainment-led books. If you are a fan of blockbuster action movies then chances are this will be right up your street. ( )

2002

Eight years ago, Dr. David Beck seemed to have it all. Most of all, the love of his life, his wife Elizabeth. They had know each other since they were children and at the age of 12 had shared their first kiss and carved their initials in a tree at the lake front summer camp of David's grandfather. Every year since, they returned to that tree for their "kiss time" anniversary. Or they had until that night eight years ago, when they were attacked at the lake, David knocked unconscious and Elizabeth dragged away to her death at the hands of a serial killer, KillRoy.

Or was she?

On the anniversary of her murder, David receives an e-mail, making a reference to something only he and Elizabeth would understand. But how could it be? Her body was found, her killer is in jail. Is this some horrible joke? Is he going mad, wishing to believe something that is impossible or could, somehow, Elizabeth possibly be alive. He is warned to tell no one. Can he trust anyone to help him find the truth? The police, the FBI, his best friend since college, Shauna...will asking for their help put Elizabeth in more danger if she is alive and what price is David willing to pay to find out the truth of what happen that night.

This is the first one of Coben's books that I have read and a fine introduction to his work it is. It is a well written, fast paced thriller with enough action and twists and turns to keep you interested from the first page to the satisfying conclusion. And he also treats us to a good cast of characters to accompany us on the journey, characters that are never one dimension. There are good cops and bad, fine upstanding citizens that may have some very nasty secrets and even our "hero" David may have a few skeletons of his own that he would rather keep unknown. But the price of truth may have a very high cost that will play out until the very last page.
Overall, a satisfying, entertaining thriller that will certainly have me checking out some others of Mr. Coben books. Tell No One is a stand alone mystery but I am also anxious to check out his Myron Bolitar series, for which he is perhaps best known. ( )

this is about the 5th Harlan Coben book I have read, and so far it's the best...it's a fast-paced thriller that moves much quicker than the other ones i've read...every chapter will leave you on the edge of your seat...or La-Z-Boy ( )

This book was suggested to me by someone on Shelfari while playing a recommendation game. As soon as I checked it out I immediately thought it would be an interesting story so I added it to my ever growing TBR (to be read) list, or as I saw someone call it once, Mount TBR. I had never heard of Harlan Coben prior to this so I looked around for reviews of his books and they all had good things to say about them.

David Beck and his wife Elizabeth were visiting the family lake house when they were brutally attacked. Elizabeth was murdered that night and David was left for dead. Now eight years later, someone is playing a nasty joke on Dr Beck by sending him anonymous emails which lead him to believe that Elizabeth is still alive. But how could that be? When Elizabeth's body was found she was identified and her murderer had been caught and jailed. Dr Beck knows that it is impossible, but the hope that he will see Elizabeth once again sends him in pursuit of her. Unknowingly Dr Beck ends up being a suspect for several crimes and things are not looking good for him.

This book is truly brilliant, just a few pages in and I was hooked. It was impossible to put it down. The story is fast paced, and with Dr Beck running from the police it made for lots of action and suspense. There are also lots of twists throughout the plot which keeps you asking what is going to happen next. However the biggest twist was definitely the ending, I never saw it coming! Coben leads you to believe that everything has fallen into place and that the person behind it all has been identified, that is until you read the last lines and you find out that it is actually a different story entirely. This was a well thought out story and I liked Coben's style of writing, I just love it when a book sucks me right in and I can't stop reading. I nearly ruined the book for myself because for a reason unbeknownst to me I decided to skim over the last page when I was still early on in the book. It did reveal one thing but I didn't really get the ending then, so I'm happy that it didn't ruin the story. Just one piece of advice, try not to do that as much as you can.

I will definitely be reading more books by Harlan Coben, in fact I purchased The Woods along with this book because I read good reviews for it too. Oh and I also just learned that Tell No One was made into a movie so I will have to check it out as well. Even though I rarely ever like movies that are based on books, I still want to watch them to see what they managed to come up with! ( )

good read - Dr's wife kidnapped & presumed dead until 8 yeas later when a message appear on the Dr's computer ( )

Fast paced, edge-of-your-seat suspense. Couldn't put it down. ( )

this is making me very anxious, hope I get thru it :)

Ok, I got through the book and it was a very exciting story, however, I don't know why it made me so anxious. Throughout the entire story, I had such a horrible feeling. I do enjoy a good mystery/thriller every now and then and this certainly was that. I guess, I felt very protective of Dr. Beck from the very beginning and wanted him to find his Elizabeth. The tension to do this was felt from the very first page and it heightened page by page. Maybe I was in the wrong frame of mind to enjoy this book to its fullest.

Inspite of my anxieties about this book, I do highly recommend it. It sure will make for a good summer read. ( )

TELL NO ONE is Harlan Coben's first standalone novel and deviation from the Myron Bolitar series. Dr. David Beck is practically still a newlywed when he loses his wife, Elizabeth, to a brutal murder by a serial killer. Eight years later two men are found dead in the same area where Elizabeth had been abducted. It is determined that the two men had been dead for approximately...eight years. Then the craziness begins. David Beck begins to receive cryptic messages leading him to believe his wife is alive. And at the same time the police begin investigating Beck as his wife's murderer, even though her murder was attributed to the serial killer and closed eight years ago. What is the truth and can Beck uncover it before the police close in on him?

I listened to TELL NO ONE on audio book. Recorded Books published this audio book and it was read by Ed Sala. While I think Sala did a very nice job with the reading, emphasizing appropriately to enhance the thrill effect, the one objection I had was that he sounded too old for the character of David Beck. I had a hard time getting past that as I listened.

The plot of this book is outstanding, and I believe that a large reason for that is the theme of the novel. The overall idea that a person could love and miss someone so much that they would be willing to give their own life to have that person back is not a foreign emotion to most people. So, while 99.9% of the world would never encounter a situation anywhere near David Beck's situation, they can still identify with this character, share an understanding of his grief. That understanding is what heightens the tension of this novel. And of course Coben's twists add a degree of excitement to the plot as well.

Coben is a character genius. Deviating from his tried and true cast from the Bolitar mysteries he creates a new ensemble equally as rich. David Beck is far from your Superman hero. After all the man failed to save his wife from being abducted. But Beck's strengths lie in his intelligence, his devotion and his humanity. One of the most poignant scenes in the book for me was when Beck assaults a police officer and is absolutely mortified and repulsed by his behavior. He acted instinctively and could not believe it was he who was behaving in such a manner. That characteristic is far more attractive to me as a reader than the character who throws violence around without a second thought. Coben leaves that to the masochistic villain Eric Wu.

But another element of Coben's character genius is his diverse cast of character. All the heroes are not lily-white. As he does with Win in the Bolitar mysteries, Coben adds a character who makes the reader check his/her beliefs. A character who for all intents and purposes does bad things. But his character is simple enough to label as bad. Tyrese fills this role in TELL NO ONE. And it would not be a signature Coben novel without humor. Shauna provides a great deal of this humor. The reader knows right off the bat that fun has walked in when Beck's assistant intercoms him to say that, "you're...uh...um...Shauna is here."

TELL NO ONE was an exciting thriller that had me gripping my steering wheel a little tighter than usual, laughing out loud, and declaring "ah ha!" Now I can finally rent the movie! ( )

I devoured this book in something like 4 hours. It was very compelling, albeit somewhat farfetched. I found the perfect love and happiness of Elizabeth and David impossible to believe. They have been together almost continuously since the age of 7 and he still pines for her 8 years after her death. They have all sorts of weird rituals around a first kiss when they were 12. That’s where Elizabeth was taken, at the site of their first kiss.

She was taken by a couple of guys hired by Griffin Scope (of Scope mouthwash fame). They took her because she lied an alibi for a person accused of murdering Brandon Scope, Griffin’s favorite son. Brandon had beaten her up once in the course of her working for the family’s charity foundation. Brandon was a complete sociopath and drug user but the old man never knew. When he was shot, it was assumed that it could be pinned on this career criminal until Elizabeth lied for him. She knew who the real killer was but wouldn’t say.

They should have killed her but her father found out. Hoyt Parker, a cop and paid lackey of Griffin Scope, found out what was going to happen and snatched her back, killing the two thugs. It was the discovery of their long dead bodies that brought all this to the surface. Hoyt had been hiding Elizabeth out of the country for the past 8 years, but now Elizabeth wants back. She is contacting Beck and teasing him into a meeting. But he’s been under surveillance by Scope for the last 8 years and they follow and realize she’s alive. The FBI gets into the act because they think he killed Elizabeth back then and the serial killer it was pinned on didn’t do it.

So he runs with the help of the father of one of his patients, a drug dealer named Tyrese. With the help of his old college buddy, Shauna, who is now Dave’s sister’s girlfriend, he gets to the bottom of things and manages to get the FBI onto Scope. He and Elizabeth are reunited. Ugh. What a sappy ending to a great thriller. Intrigue. Dirty secrets. Money. Murder. It was pretty good. ( )

gelezen als bookazine :-) ( )

This was Coben’s first post-Bolitar stand-alone novel, and he starts out with a theme that reoccurs through many of his stand-alones — the missing and/or presumed dead loved one. It borders a little on over-used, yet it never fails to create suspense. It takes a while in this story before you’re really sure whether or not Elizabeth is alive, but figuring that out is far from the whole story. There’s a lot going on here — so much that I got a little lost in a few places — but Coben does a good job of tying it all up in the end. And I really did not guess the final twist. It was twisty enough to make you rethink some of Beck’s actions. Gotta love that! ( )

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. ( )

Tell No One was the first book by Harlan Coben that I read. I found the story entertaining even if a bit frustrating when the author forces the obvious or misleads. ( )

This is a great book every page reviles a differentiation on the story line, keep you hooked until the end, easy read well worth a look ( )

Harlan Coben writes so many twists and turns into this thriller you can't help but wonder how he kept track of it all. Like many mass market thrillers, there are a number of points in the book that give you reason to question a character's actions-- and all too often character's choices seemed forced, as if they were doing something merely because it fit into the author's thriller template. The action centers around pediatrics Doctor David Beck. Beck's life-long love was murdered eight years prior, but suddenly he starts getting cryptic messages with details that only she could know. Is she really alive? Why does she tell him, "They're watching-- tell no one?" Beck abandons everything, including good reason, to follow the possibility that his Elizabeth is still alive and on the run after all this time. The set-up is good, but I'd lost my suspension of disbelief by the end. Trying to guess who really did it and why is like trying to guess who will win an election that's up for bids-- it simply stops mattering after a while. Similar to some David Baldacci and some John Grisham books-- it's a thrill ride with little substance. ( )

This was my first Harlen Coben book, and I read it because it was chosen for the 2008 Abraham Lincoln Book Award list. To say I couldn't put it down is as cliche as it gets, but that's what happened. It took me two days to squeeze this between work, home and making dinner. I'm totally hooked on his books now, and steadily making my way through all of them. ( )

I am a Harlan Coben fan and have enjoyed all his books. This one is a bit different. While it has his usual plot twists and turns- and he excels at that- in this book he failed to develop characters that we really understood or even cared about very much.They seemed to be more of a plot device than real people. Secondly, he did have to stretch to tie all the elements together, and it wasn't particularly believable. However, despite these flaws, I still enjoyed the book. So 3 1/2 stars.
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I really liked that it kept moving, and was always hard to put down, even when I only picked it up for a “couple quick pages”. While I was finishing it up last night, there were a couple of times I realized that I wasn’t breathing. ;) Lots of different layers to the story, and interesting things happening simultaneously. Believable, down to earth, funny characters. I have never read this author before, but it is love at first read. ( )

Adapted into a French movie.

Definitely a light read but the story has good characters, the plot really pops, and the pace of the story is perfect. Mr.Coben is a refreshingly concise writer. I thought it was so good, once I finished it, I just wanted to start reading it again. ( )

a cracking thriller, gripped me from the first chapter and kept me guessing all the way through. Quick and easy to read but very satisfying with a good twist at the end. ( )

Good but not as good as the French film of the book which was excellent! ( )

One of my favorite books by this author. The other is Gone for Good. Both are very un-put-downable & kept me up til all hours to finish. ( )

Okay, we've all seen the movie - in French with sub-titles at least. It was good and it followed the book faithfully. But somehow it didn't seem as exciting on the screen as when I read the words on the page. Maybe it needed the Hollywood treatment. Or then again, maybe it's just Harlan Coben's skill as a writer that he can make it seem so exciting when others can't. Harlan Coben is the master of this genre - the missing person presumed dead, the voice or face from the past - and in his hands the material is both mysterious and suspenseful. ( )