The Match
Wilde, the foundling raised in the New Jersey woods who first appeared in The Boy from the Woods, has finally taken a DNA test in the hope of identifying the parents who left him alone in the forest as a child. The match he gets back is from his biological father, who quickly disappears again, and from a network of cousins who agree to help him track the man down. The trail leads to a glossy reality-television family with secrets to bury, to a vicious anonymous online tribunal that uses doxing and pile-ons as a weapon against people it deems guilty, and back to Wilde's friend, the celebrity attorney Hester Crimstein. As bodies start turning up, Wilde finds himself caught between two questions he is not sure he wants to answer: who his parents were, and what kind of man he has become without them. Harlan Coben's second Wilde novel uses a missing-father plot to interrogate the cruelty of social media justice and the meaning of family.
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What you might want to know about The Match
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Wilde, the former military investigator found as a small boy living wild in the New Jersey woods with no memory of his family, gets a hit on a DNA site. The trail points to a private island reality show called Maverick, an old paternal cousin, and an online vigilante group hunting a bully.
Yes. The Match is the second book in Harlan Coben's Wilde series, after The Boy from the Woods. The two share a continuing protagonist.
A Wilde TV adaptation has been discussed as part of Netflix's broader Harlan Coben deal. As of 2025, no formal adaptation has been confirmed.
The Match was written by Harlan Coben, published in 1996 by Grand Central Pub.
The Match is 368 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Match takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Match is a standalone novel by Harlan Coben, not part of a series.
The Match is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
