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“The main character, Dr. Marc Seidman, was a plastic...”

written by Belk2 on 03/06/2008

Good Points
Harlan coben uses immense vocabulary and it is a challenging book to read. I COULN'T PUT THE BOOK DOWN!!

Bad Points
the author tends to go off of the point.

General Comments
The main character, Dr. Marc Seidman, was a plastic surgeon whose specialty was repairing children's facial injuries, was shot and nearly killed while standing in his kitchen. He woke up in the hospital twelve days later to discover that his wife was killed and their daughter Tara had disappeared. The police searched for the culprits but had few leads and no ransom note. The police detective and FBI agent assigned to the murder and kidnapping case begin to wonder whether Marc himself was involved in the crime. They suspect his marriage was in shaky condition.
When Marc was finally released from the hospital, his father-in-law Edgar Portman had him brought to directly to his house. A ransom note had finally been received. Edgar had followed the instructions in the note and filled a bag with two million dollars in cash. The ransom note read:'We are watching. If you contact the authorities, you will never see your daughter again. There will be no second chance. Marc confides in his best friend and lawyer, Lenny, and decides to tell the detective and FBI agent about the ransom. Marc turns over the bag of cash at the drop point, but Tara is not returned.
But then, eighteen months later, another ransom message is delivered, along with evidence that Tara is alive. With each step Marc makes to recover his daughter, the mystery of the shootings, his wife's death and Tara's kidnapping seems to uncover bit by bit.


No Second Chance taps into a parents' deepest fear ' " the disappearance of their child. the story sucked me in from the first page and the grasping first sentence of'When the first bullet hit my chest, I thought of my daughter... '