Richard's Review:

One of Harlan Coben’s signature trademarks is the way he whipcracks his characters through sudden, dramatic changes of fortune. And they don’t come much more dramatic than poor David Burroughs’s overnight disaster.

One moment he’s sleeping peacefully next to his wife in their beautiful house in the suburbs: the next, he is waking to find himself covered in blood. And it’s not his own. It’s his three-year-old son’s. Little Matthew has been slaughtered in the night and the evidence points overwhelmingly towards David as the killer.

Although he knows he’s innocent, David is nevertheless beset by doubts. Did he sleepwalk? Was this some kind of appalling, unconscious act? Paralysed by grief and uncertainty, he can barely summon up the strength to defend himself in court and is duly sent to prison for life. And that would seem to be that. Until…

Judy's Review:

Until, five years into his sentence in a maximum security jail, David gets a visitor. His first since he was led from court. It is his wife’s sister, Rachel, an investigative journalist. What can she possibly want after all this time?

Coben swings us a left hook here. Rachel throws a doozy of a punch into the story. As she sits opposite her chained and shackled brother-in-law, she tells him something he – and even she - can scarcely believe.

Matthew is alive. And Rachel has proof – a photograph that a friend took during a trip to a theme park. There is a boy standing in the background. A boy with a highly unusual, distinctive birthmark on his face. It is the face of Matthew, without question, still completely recognisable five years on.

So whose blood was it on David that terrible night? Whose grotesquely injured body was taken by everyone to be his little boy’s?

David must escape – and from a prison no-one has ever broken out of – to find the truth, clear his name, and save his son.