I recently read, back to back with some overlap, two mysteries by very different authors. The first was titled The Scoutmaster by Luisa Buehler, and the second was Caught by Harlan Coben. Coben is, obviously, a best selling author who is known nationally and internationally, and whose books can be found almost anywhere. (I even saw them at Menard's!) Buehler, on the other hand, is a local author, residing in (I think) Lisle, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and is published by Echelon Press. I'd imagine that plenty of people have never heard of her.

I wanted to enjoy Buehler's book featuring sleuth Grace Marsden. It's set in familiar environs, and it seemed to be a promising premise. A group of Boy Scouts finds an old munitions crate buried in the woods, and when they open it, they find the skeleton of a cat in it, complete with collar. And the next thing you know, Grace is showing some boys the location of the discovery, and she is attacked.

This is the start of a pattern for this book. Grace is continually attacked in some manner throughout the book. To tell you the truth, after a while, I was just laughing about it, speculating how the next attack would take place. It really pulled me out of the story.

The mystery involves stolen munitions in WWII from a plant that my father actually worked at (another neat thing that makes me want to like this story), a Scoutmaster who ran his troop like his own private fiefdom, and of course, a couple of murders, some old, and one very new. The Wiccan religion plays a part, as does devil worship, corruption in city government and on the police force, a relatively new stepson for Grace, burglaries and vandalism, and too many other things to mention. I found myself confused often as I read the book, not knowing who was speaking because I didn't get a sense of who was in the room or at the meeting or whatever.

Another problem was with editing. One character would be speaking, and suddenly another one would be talking but whoever it was wouldn't be identified. Or was it another character at all, or just a continuation of what the first was saying? Missing quotation marks in some spots didn't help matters, but I can't blame them on the author completely. All in all, just too much going on, too hard to keep track of everything, and much of it seemed picked out of thin air, like, let's throw a clue in here, then we'll go back and add in some reference earlier in the story so it isn't a total shock.

Now, on to Coben's mystery. This was a can't-put-down book for me. Like Buehler's book, it tells a convoluted tale involving many facets. Unlike her book, it remains tightly focused and the story clips right along. In Caught, a man is trapped and exposed as a pedophile. But he insists that he's been set up, and there is no history of any wrongdoing, no intuitions on anyone's part that he might have proclivities leaning that way. When Wendy Tynes, the TV reporter whose face is onscreen with this show, begins to look further into it, she ends up watching the man get shot to death.

Instead of making her back off, she feels responsible, and starts to investigate further. Soon she realizes that his fall from grace is loaded with improbable coincidences relating to him and to people connected to him. When he is linked (posthumously) to the disappearance of another teenaged girl, Wendy just looks harder, because nothing seems to make sense to her now.

Coben is the master of the plot twist. For my money, he's the best out there working in this suspense thriller field. He always surprises me, and this one was no exception. His usual theme of the past reverberating forward into the present is obvious.

The contrast between these two books, both of which depend on misdirection and plot twists, was heightened because I was reading Buehler's novel when I picked up Coben's and started it. It was all I could do to keep reading her story and not drop it like a hot potato for this latest Harlan Coben novel. One was so well written, with tight plotting, vivid characters, and tension that flowed from every scene. The other was, while not poorly written, just too forced and too wordy. I liked Wendy Tynes a whole bunch by the end of the story. I'm not sure I feel much of anything about Grace Marsden. I think I'm supposed to like her, but I just ... didn't.