The Boy from the Woods was published by Grand Central Publishing in 2020, introducing one of Coben’s most unusual protagonists. Wilde was found at approximately age six, living feral in the Ramapo Mountains of New Jersey — no identification, no memory of his parents, no explanation for how he got there. Raised in foster care, he grew into a man who remains more comfortable in the wilderness than in society, living alone in the woods in a converted shipping container.
When Naomi Pine, a bullied high school student, disappears, her criminal-defense-attorney father asks Wilde for help. Wilde’s investigation — which takes him from the high school’s social hierarchies into a political campaign and a conspiracy involving the manipulation of social media — forces him to engage with exactly the kind of community he has spent his life avoiding.
The novel works on two levels: as a thriller (the disappearance and its connections to larger schemes) and as a character study of a man defined by absence — a man without origins, without family, without the ordinary social bonds that anchor most people to the world. Wilde’s investigation into Naomi’s disappearance becomes, inevitably, an investigation into his own origins.
Collecting The Boy from the Woods
First edition (Grand Central Publishing, New York, 2020): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $8–$20
- Signed copies: $15–$30