The Stranger

The Stranger is a novel by Harlan Coben, published in 2015 and the fourteenth of his stand-alone crime novels. It was adapted for television in 2020.

The stranger appears in ordinary places, gives no name and offers no reason, and tells each of the people he approaches something true that they were not supposed to know. Adam Price, a lawyer with a comfortable marriage, two sons and every appearance of a settled life, is one of his targets: he is told something about his wife, Corinne, and when he asks her about it she disappears. The novel follows his attempts to find out what has happened to her and what else has been kept from him, and it carries him into considerably darker circumstances than the single secret he was handed at the beginning. Running underneath the plot is the question of what the stranger actually wants.

Coben writes domestic suspense built on the idea that any marriage contains things neither partner has said out loud, and he keeps the ordinary surfaces of suburban life intact while the ground beneath them shifts.