Eleven years ago, Ken fled his family's suburban New Jersey neighborhood after Will's ex-girlfriend, Julie Miller, was raped and strangled. The Kleins eventually convinced themselves that Ken perished on the lam. But as Will discovers, the facts are not so simple. On her deathbed, his mother tells him that Ken is still alive. Then Will's girlfriend and "soul mate" disappears too, only to have her fingerprints turn up at a New Mexico homicide scene. How are these tragedies connected? And what's their relationship to the recent appearance of a contract killer known as the Ghost? With help from an abused ex-hooker, a former white supremacist turned yoga guru, and Julie's younger sister, Will finds himself in a tightly twisted plot that turns on double identities and misplaced trust and that forces him to dig for the courage he was always sure he lacked.

Although the premise sounds much like that of Harlan Coben's last book, the acclaimed Tell No One, and the books' ingenuous protagonists are nearly interchangeable, Gone for Good quickly establishes its separate but equally suspenseful identity. This is a tale of manifold deceptions guaranteed to show its readers up as suckers, and to make them love every moment of the experience. --J. Kingston Pierce [close]