Six Years

Six Years is a novel by the American writer Harlan Coben, published in 2013.

Jake is a college professor who has spent six years doing what he said he would: staying away from Natalie and getting on with his career. He breaks his promise once, for the funeral, and the sight of a stranger in the widow's place turns everything he believed about the most important period of his life into a question. He starts asking about Natalie, and the answers do not fit together: people who should know her do not, records do not match, and every enquiry makes somebody less willing to help. Coben writes the book as a puzzle with an ordinary man at the centre, and Jake's advantage is that he teaches politics, which is to say he is trained to notice when a story has been arranged.

The novel moves between the present and the months in which Jake and Natalie knew each other, and the reader is given the end of one story before the other is finished.