Missing You
Harlan Coben, 2014
★ 4.01 from 72.5k ratings on Goodreads
A New York detective opens a dating site and finds the face of the fiancé who vanished eighteen years ago—a cold case that may not be cold. A curious, quick-moving read with a dating-site mystery at its center, shadowed by unease and old love.
Feels like curiosity and unease. About adventure and love.
Who it’s for
You may enjoy this if you like cold-case puzzles, online-dating hooks, and a detective story that moves briskly. Some readers found the opening slow and the subplots tangled, with the romantic thread and ending landing weakly for them.
Why read it
The premise offers a sharp pull: a familiar face from the past makes an old disappearance feel live again.
A page from the book
The joke about dating sites collapses when you remember each face is a life.
This was the flip side. It was easy to be cynical and poke fun, but when she stepped back, Kat realized something that pierced her straight through the heart: Every profile was a life. Simple, yep, but behind every cliché-ridden, please-like-me profile was a fellow human being with dreams and aspirations and desires. These people hadn’t signed up, paid their fee, or filled out this information idly. Think about it: Every one of these lonely people came to this website—signed in and clicked on profiles—hoping it would be different this time, hoping against hope that finally they would meet the one person who, in the end, would be the most important person in their lives. What readers say
Readers largely found this a gripping, fast-moving thriller with a strong mystery and online-dating hook, though some were frustrated by a slow start, tangled subplots, and a weak romantic thread or ending.
Harlan Coben.Coben was born in Newark and sets much of his work in New Jersey; his thrillers have been translated into more than forty languages.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Missing You for me?
- You may enjoy this if you like cold-case puzzles, online-dating hooks, and a detective story that moves briskly. Some readers found the opening slow and the subplots tangled, with the romantic thread and ending landing weakly for them.
- What is Missing You like?
- A curious, quick-moving read with a dating-site mystery at its center, shadowed by unease and old love. Feels like curiosity and unease. About adventure and love.
- What should I read after Missing You?
- If you liked Missing You, try City of Bones (Cassandra Clare), The Racketeer (John Grisham) and Northern Lights (Nora Roberts).
A taste of the feed
Being ninety percent certain is fine, until someone else does the arithmetic.
“You guessed? You must have been pretty sure, considering you could have killed me.” “I was ninety percent sure.” “I see,” Clary said. There must have been something in her voice, because he turned to look at her. Her hand cracked across his face, a slap that rocked him back on his heels. He put his hand to his cheek, more in surprise than pain. “What the hell was that for?” “The other ten percent.”
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What it feels like to see something too large to be real.
His only coherent thought as they shuddered along was that nothing real should be that massive. As the sun beamed God fingers through the heavy sky around it, the shadows began to drip and spread, blue over white, and its icy face glinted.
Northern Lights · Nora Roberts
A home you can't stop looking at, even though it hurts.
I lived at number twenty-three Blenheim Road for five years, blissfully happy and utterly wretched. I can’t look at it now. That was my first home. Not my parents’ place, not a flatshare with other students, my first home. I can’t bear to look at it. Well, I can, I do, I want to, I don’t want to, I try not to. Every day I tell myself not to look, and every day I look. I can’t help myself, even though there is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me.
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