Stay Close

Stay Close is a novel by the American writer Harlan Coben, published in 2012.

The book follows three people leading lives they did not plan. Megan has settled into a marriage and a routine, and her dissatisfaction is beginning to make her careless about the life she left behind. Ray lost the woman he loved and has spent the years since doing work he is ashamed of. Broome has kept the file on a local disappearance open for seventeen years, mainly because the family of the missing man deserves an answer. When the anniversary produces a second disappearance, the three of them are pulled into the same set of facts, and what each of them knows about the others is not the whole truth. Coben writes short chapters in alternating voices and keeps the reader ahead of some characters and behind others.

The story moves between a comfortable suburb and the parts of the past its residents would rather forget, and the three of them turn out to be connected to each other more closely than any of them knows.