Thank you to NetGalley and Random House, Cornerstone for this ARC.

Sami Kierce, a former Detective in the NYPD but fired after tampering with evidence, is now making ends meet by being a private detective and teaching a  criminology night class to a gaggle of misfits. One day, a woman enters the room, sees him and flees. Sami recognises her immediately - he met Anna backpacking in Málaga, Spain more than two decades ago, and one morning he woke up next to her with a bloody knife in his hand and her in a pool of blood. How can she be alive and here, all these years later?

After tracking her down to the estate of the rich Belmont family, he is hired by them to find out who had kidnapped her. So starts a fairly complicated case about Victoria Belmont/Anna who was last seen on New Year's Eve 1999 but returned to her family 11 years later, not able to tell people what had happened to her. We're also delving into the murder of Sami's former fiancée Nicole Brett after her murderer Tad Grayson is released due to a technicality directly to do with Sami's fall from grace. And why is someone stalking his family?

I found the storyline quite confusing, especially as it took me a while to understand that Spain must have happened in 2003 and not 2000 as the blurb suggests, because the narrative variously talks about events having happened 22 and 25 years ago.

This story is faintly connected to characters and events from a previous book, but we're never given a proper summary as that would be spoilers for that book. I have read Fool Me Once and remembered the bare bones, but I had no recollection anymore of Judith Burkett, who, reading up on her, really should be in prison, not still lording it over her decimated family and poor Caroline.

I love all the twists and turns, connections and secrets and lies in Harlan Coben's books. I also liked Sami's quirky criminology students and how they started sleuthing with him, no questions asked. They are such characters, and it's good that Sami has people around him he can rely on, like wife Molly, lawyer Arthur and former police partner Marty. 

This is a fast-paced and well-written semi standalone novel with several strands that come together towards the end. Nothing is as it seems and no one is as innocent as they first look. It reads extremely well and fast - the sentences are short and easy to comprehend in this far-fetched but entertaining and gripping page-turner that speeds up the more we get to the conclusion. I finished the book in a day.