Helpful Score: 4
What a great book! I picked it up to glance through it and finished 4 hours later. A story of the fragility of family relationships, of trust and mistrust. All of these things wrapped up with a degree of mystery leave you with a book you'll be thinking about long after you've finished it.
Helpful Score: 2
Such a great book, I could not put it down! I like the way the author tells the story kind of from the end, or really from both ends. I found it very engaging and suspenseful. I found the story was very well told and allowed you to really relate to the main character.
Helpful Score: 1
Red Leaves is a page turner, much better than other books by the same author. A teenage boy is the last one to see a young girl he babysat alive. The investigation focuses on him, unravelling his family and the community. Even his dad isn't so sure he's innocent....ending is a shocker!
Helpful Score: 1
The disappearance of a young girl creates an atmosphere of suspicion and hate in a nice family on the east coast. Well written and profane. Harlan Coben, literary critic, says that "Red Leaves" is "one of the best novels you'll read this year--gripping, beautifully written, haunting, surprising, and devastating."
Helpful Score: 1
WOW!! What a page turner!!! Really a seriously good mystery with lots of family drama.
Ending will grab you!!
Loved it.
Gengie
Ending will grab you!!
Loved it.
Gengie
Helpful Score: 1
Well written, good mystery.
Helpful Score: 1
This great book takes you through the eyes of a father whose son has been accused of kidnapping the little girl he regularly babysat. At first the father cannot believe his own child would do such a thing but then slowly comes to terms with the idea that the rest of the community has been pushing-his son murdered the little girl.
A father gets to know his son, who he might not have gotten to know otherwise.
A unique murder mystery that really leaves you questioning until the end. I remember a few slow points but really, really pays off in the end.
A father gets to know his son, who he might not have gotten to know otherwise.
A unique murder mystery that really leaves you questioning until the end. I remember a few slow points but really, really pays off in the end.
Helpful Score: 1
Read with my book club, I enjoyed the book. A quick, easy read, kept me turning the pages. Very nice.
Helpful Score: 1
Excellent book. It keeps you guessing.
Fantastic mystery novel. Cook writes so eloquently and captivates you from the beginning to the end. I felt Cook really drew me into the life of the main character, Eric Moore, and the ultimate disintegration of his once solid world when eight-year old Amy Giordano disappears, with his son as the main suspect.
Good book about a missing child and a teenaged neighbor.
When turmoil disrupts the happy family life of Eric Moore, he finds himself searching his past for tragedies he may have missed. Good read, compelling narrative.
I did not like this book at all. The actual story takes up probably 1/8 of the number of pages. The rest is filled with flowery, superfluous, trying-too-hard writing. It seemed as if he used every cliche or paranoid mind delusions he could muster up to describe the main character's feelings or insecurities at every turn. It got to be quite tiring to read and I couldn't even stand to finish it.
A father suspects that his son may not be innocent of kidnapping and murder! Really makes you think...
Very good book--wasn't sure when I got it if I'd like it or not but it grabs you from the very beginning. The characters are likable just because you can relate to them and move through the story with them and get to know them and their feelings. It will grab your heart as it revolves around a lonely teenager suspected of something when a young girl is missing after he babysit with her one night. Very well written.
This is a great book! It is a quick read that really comes together well and left me with an ending that I know I will continue to think about for some time. I had never read this author before and the really good news is that he has lots of other titles available- I just ordered another one, can't wait to see if it's as good!
Absolutely loved this book. Couldn't put it down!!
GREAT BOOK.
INGRID S
INGRID S
This is what the book is about:
From Publishers Weekly....
In this affecting, if oddly flat, crime novel from Edgar-winner Cook (The Chatham School Affair), Eric Moore, a prosperous businessman, watches his safe, solid world disintegrate. When eight-year-old Amy Giordano, whom Eric's teenage son, Keith, was babysitting, disappears from her family's house, many believe Keith is an obvious suspect, and not even his parents are completely convinced that he wasn't somehow involved. As time passes without Amy being found, a corrosive suspicion seeps into every aspect of Eric's life. That suspicion is fed by Eric's shaky family history-a father whose failed plans led from moderate wealth to near penury, an alcoholic older brother who's never amounted to much, a younger sister fatally stricken with a brain tumor and a mother driven to suicide. Not even Eric's loving wife, Meredith, is immune from his doubts as he begins to examine and re-examine every aspect of his life. The ongoing police investigation and the anguish of the missing girl's father provide periodic goads as Eric's futile attempts to allay his own misgivings seem only to lead him into more desperate straits. The totally unexpected resolution is both shocking and perfectly apt.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist....
Cook's latest is proof that he is maturing into a gifted storyteller. An eight-year-old girl is missing. The police quickly zero in on her baby-sitter, Keith Moore. Keith's parents proclaim his innocence, but his father, Eric, has his own secret doubts. The way the author tells the story, it really doesn't matter whether Keith is guilty or not; what matters is the way the Moore family slowly disintegrates, as his parents deal in their own ways with the possibility that their son may be a monster. The novel is narrated by Eric; perhaps the story might have been slightly more effective if it were told in the third person, so we could watch Eric fall apart (rather than listen to him tell us about it), but that's nit-picking. In terms of its emotional depth and carefully drawn characters, this is one of Cook's best novels. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Publishers Weekly....
In this affecting, if oddly flat, crime novel from Edgar-winner Cook (The Chatham School Affair), Eric Moore, a prosperous businessman, watches his safe, solid world disintegrate. When eight-year-old Amy Giordano, whom Eric's teenage son, Keith, was babysitting, disappears from her family's house, many believe Keith is an obvious suspect, and not even his parents are completely convinced that he wasn't somehow involved. As time passes without Amy being found, a corrosive suspicion seeps into every aspect of Eric's life. That suspicion is fed by Eric's shaky family history-a father whose failed plans led from moderate wealth to near penury, an alcoholic older brother who's never amounted to much, a younger sister fatally stricken with a brain tumor and a mother driven to suicide. Not even Eric's loving wife, Meredith, is immune from his doubts as he begins to examine and re-examine every aspect of his life. The ongoing police investigation and the anguish of the missing girl's father provide periodic goads as Eric's futile attempts to allay his own misgivings seem only to lead him into more desperate straits. The totally unexpected resolution is both shocking and perfectly apt.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist....
Cook's latest is proof that he is maturing into a gifted storyteller. An eight-year-old girl is missing. The police quickly zero in on her baby-sitter, Keith Moore. Keith's parents proclaim his innocence, but his father, Eric, has his own secret doubts. The way the author tells the story, it really doesn't matter whether Keith is guilty or not; what matters is the way the Moore family slowly disintegrates, as his parents deal in their own ways with the possibility that their son may be a monster. The novel is narrated by Eric; perhaps the story might have been slightly more effective if it were told in the third person, so we could watch Eric fall apart (rather than listen to him tell us about it), but that's nit-picking. In terms of its emotional depth and carefully drawn characters, this is one of Cook's best novels. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
A child is killed, the babysitter is a suspect and his father isn't sure whether his son is innocent or not. A good read.
