THE MATCH by Harlan Coben

 Finished We 1/4/23

This is one of the hardback books that The Brandenburgs gave me for Xmas.

This is about a 'wild boy' who was left in the woods and learned to live by breaking into vacant summer homes. He uses websites that specialize in searching the users' DNA profiles to find matches of relatives and this drives the action. 

From the book's page at GoodReads:

"'At the age of somewhere between 35 and 45 - he didn't know exactly how old he was - Wilde found his father ...'

Wilde has grown up knowing nothing of his family, and even less about his own identity . All he knows is that, as a young child, he was found living a feral existence in the Ramapo mountains of New Jersey.

He became known simply as Wilde, the boy from the woods.

Now Wilde has had a hit on the DNA website he has been researching. A 100% match. His father. They meet up, and Wilde soon realizes that his father doesn't even know he had a son and is as mystified as Wilde is by his existence.

Undaunted, Wilde continues his research for his family on DNA websites where he becomes caught up in a community of online doxxers, a secret group committed to exposing anonymous trolls.

Then one by one these doxxers start to die, and it soon becomes clear that a serial killer is targeting this secret community - and that his next victim might be Wilde himself. "

The problem with Coben's books is 'there are not enough words on the page'. He has the story covered in spades, but character development is lacking. And, in this novel especially, I think he just added too many characters and made the tale unnecessarily confusing. Coben keeps you reading, but his books tend to fade from my memory fairly quickly.