The story opens eight years later when David, now a pediatrician, receives a bizarre email. It would have been his wedding anniversary and the message is clearly from someone who knows intimate details of his life with Elizabeth. A subsequent email shows Elizabeth on a busy street mouthing to him the words that she is sorry. Other instructions plus the admonition to “tell no one” arrive through an email account that can only be traced to an alias.

David’s sister Linda and her significant other, Shauna, are David’s best friends. David confides in Shauna that he believes Elizabeth is still alive. Shauna tries her best to make him accept Elizabeth’s death by introducing him to tricks possible through photography.

About the same time, the bodies of two men are discovered near the lake where Elizabeth was abducted. The FBI arrives to ask for David’s DNA, pursuing their view that these were David’s accomplices in the killing of his wife for her $200,000 insurance policy. The FBI also confronts him with photographs of his battered wife, tacitly accusing him of spousal abuse. He explains that his wife had told him that these injuries had been sustained in a minor traffic accident when he was out of town.

David elects to pursue all possibilities and visits Elizabeth’s parents and friends seeking answers. People start dying brutal deaths and tentacles from the past emerge to ensnare David in a fast moving thriller.

Tell No One is slowly and artfully constructed and the tension is sustained throughout. The author manages to work in current social issues in a noninvasive way and the story is stronger for it. The well developed characters’ dialogue is consistent and where characters larger than life are portrayed, their dialogue remains in voice.

While the ending is predictable, the way you arrive there is definitely not. Tell No One is a riveting read sending this reviewer scurrying for Coben’s back list.

--Thea Davis