This is a story about a woman named Grace Lawson who picks up her photos from a local print shop only to find there is a picture in the set that wasn’t taken with her camera. What’s strange about the picture is that when she looks closely at it, she thinks she recognizes a younger version of her husband Jack in it. And what makes it stranger still is that the woman he’s standing next to in the photo has a giant red X marked over her. When Grace takes the photo home and shows it to her husband to see if he knows anything about it, he reacts very strangely to it, claiming it isn’t him in the photo; then, excusing himself to take a phone call, he leaves the room and never comes back.

Grace is panicked. She’s part of a good marriage — her husband wouldn’t just leave her. She can’t believe a simple photo would just make him disappear. So she goes to the police, but they don’t believe her when she says her husband is in danger. They think he’s left her for another woman, perhaps the woman in the photo, and when she receives an ill-timed phone call from her husband telling her he needs some space just as she’s talking to the police, she knows they’ve written her off as the unsuspecting, cheated wife. But Grace knows her husband and can tell from the way he’s worded his phone message that he’s telling her he needs help and that the police shouldn’t be involved.

So Grace will have to find him on her own. And as she searches for him, she starts to learn that the photograph is much more dangerous than she realized. Her husband has already gone missing, and soon she receives the message loud and clear that she and her children are next if she doesn’t stop searching for him leave the photo alone.

And, as is usually the case with Coben novels, a whole cast of other characters (people in the neighborhood, long lost family members, even mobsters) become intertwined with the event depicted in that simple photograph of the crossed out girl and Grace’s younger husband. You get the sense that it’s a very small world out there.

I liked this book, but not as much as Coben’s other books. I felt the story clipped along nicely and that the suspense was thrilling enough to keep me reading through the night. I didn’t particularly care for the ending — I felt it came together too loosely in the end to justify all the connections between the characters. But hey, Coben isn’t a bestselling author for nothing. He can tell a story and he can tell it well. There’s just the right amount of gruesome violence, thrilling cat and mouse scenes, and twists along the way.