Tag Archives: Harlan Coben

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Innocent,’ by Harlan Coben

Leave a comment

The Innocent, Harlan Coben

Olivia thought again about how the abused always take the path of self-destruction. They simply could not stop themselves. They take it no matter what the consequences, no matter what the danger. Or maybe, as in her case, they take it for the opposite reason – because no matter how much life has tried to beat them down, they cannot let go of hope.

Another Harlan Coben book in my current little Coben binge. I didn’t love this one, The Innocent, quite as much as I loved Caught, which I reviewed a couple inches down the page. But it’s still a superior book.

Matt Hunter is an ex-con who works as a paralegal. He served a sentence for manslaughter. He’s married to a beautiful woman, Olivia, and they’re deeply in love with each other. She’s just learned she’s pregnant.

And their life is a lie. Olivia isn’t who she says she is.

A nun in a nearby Catholic school is murdered in her room. Police find phone records linking her to Matt’s family. Olivia goes away on a “business trip,” and Matt gets a video on his cell phone, showing her in a bedroom with another man.

Matt sets about finding out the truth – and he refuses to believe Olivia has betrayed him.

The plot is convoluted. The characters are numerous and textured, sometimes surprising us as is Cobin’s style (and I like that). We visit the sordid world of “exotic” dancing, which is not pretty. But the conclusion moved me as much as that of any novel I’ve read in a while.

Recommended. Cautions for violence (but not explicit), sexual situations (also not explicit), and only mild profanity.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Caught,’ by Harlan Coben

Leave a comment

Walker turned away because he didn’t want to admit that maybe Stanton had a point. You make so many calls in life that you don’t want to make – and you want those calls to be easy. You want to put people in neat categories, make them monsters or angels, but it almost never works that way. You work in the gray and frankly that kinda sucks. The extremes are so much easier.

During my Long March through the educational institution, I find that I have fallen behind in my Harlan Coben reading. There was a brand new book (I reviewed that the other day), plus two more I hadn’t noticed. This was good news – it meant a reading feast of extremely high quality.

Caught is, I think, my favorite to date of all Coben’s novels. The main character is Wendy Tyne, a television news reporter. She’s a young widow, and the mother of a teenage son. She does a feature where she lures child predators through online contacts, and then exposes them on video. That was how she “caught” Dan Mercer – a youth counselor whom everyone respected, and many loved – including the kids he worked with. Even Dan’s ex-wife staunchly defends him.

Then he gets tied to the disappearance of a local teenaged girl, and clues start pointing in all kinds of directions, and Wendy discovers a long-ago crime coverup, and begins to question her own judgment. Then a threat appears to her own family.

Caught is a complex story with complex characters. Not for Coben the simple stereotypes a lesser writer would have offered. The best characters can make terrible mistakes, and the worst have moments of goodness. I was particularly pleased by Wendy’s father, who rides a motorcycle and belongs to the NRA and is a fine, loving, wise man.

Harlan Coben, as far as I can figure out, is Jewish. But the major theme of this book is forgiveness, and the way he handles the subject will be edifying to any Christian.

Highly recommended. The language is mild by thriller standards. There’s no on-screen sex, and the violence is minimal, though some crime descriptions can be harrowing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fool Me Once,’ by Harlan Coben

5 Comments

Wow. What a book. Harlan Coben is one of the best thriller writers around, but Fool Me Once is unlike anything he’s written before.

I might have been inclined to pass this one over, because it involves a woman in combat, a subject that troubles me. But I trust Coben, so I went ahead and read it, and I’m glad I did. You could make an argument that the story supports my views, but I doubt that’s what Coben had in mind. Whatever his intentions, he’s written a fine, taut, explosive story.

Maya Stern Burkett is a veteran helicopter pilot from the Middle East war. She was briefly famous when video of her killing civilians during a rescue mission was leaked by a whistleblower web site. That ended her military career. Now she’s an aviation instructor. Some people say that death follows her, and it seems as if it might be true. Her sister was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered while she was overseas, and now her husband, Joe Burkett, scion of a rich and powerful family and the father of her two-year-old daughter, has been murdered.

After the funeral, Maya’s sister-in-law gives her an unexpected gift – a nanny camera. Maya trusts her nanny, and doesn’t understand the gift, but she uses it… and one day she sees something that can’t possibly be real on its daily recording. Maya starts asking questions and begins to learn that very little in her world is what it seems to be. Her life, and her daughter’s, may be at stake.

Coben does a splendid job of describing the world of a soldier dealing with PTSD. And I don’t often say that a book’s ending shocks me, but this one did. It worked, though, and I won’t soon forget it.

Highly recommended. No sex, language fairly mild (as with all Coben’s books), and the violence isn’t overwhelming.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Missing You,’ by Harlan Coben

Leave a comment

First of all, let me state at the outset the important fact that Missing You by Harlan Coben is an exceedingly good novel. One of his best, I’d say, and that’s no mean praise.

I have to say that because I’m going to do some ideological quibbling at the end.

Anyway, the main character of Missing You is Kat Donovan, a New York City police detective who very quickly finds herself tugged in several directions by a number of worries and crises.

First of all, a friend has signed her up for an online dating service. Looking through possible matches, she discovers a photograph of the fiancé who abandoned her eighteen years before. She’s never gotten over him. Everything was going fine, they were planning a life together, and then one day he was gone without a word. Now here he is, describing himself as a widower with one child. And when she sends him a message, he doesn’t seem to remember her. Continue reading ‘Missing You,’ by Harlan Coben →

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Stranger,’ by Harlan Coben

Leave a comment

Harlan Coben is a remarkable writer of thrillers. It has been noted that he avoids profanity in his dialogue, and his use of violence is pretty restrained. Nevertheless he is capable of producing books as shocking as any you will ever read, in their own way. The Stranger is Hitchcockian in its portrayal of a very ordinary man thrust into a world of lies and mortal danger, and raises societal and existential questions as well.

Adam Price is no man of action. An easygoing type, he’s a successful eminent domain lawyer, living in a prosperous New Jersey suburb. He loves his beautiful wife and his two teenage sons. He’s “living the dream,” as one of his friends likes to say.

But, as the author is careful to emphasize, “dream” is precisely the word for their lives. Their security is insecure, their happiness fragile. Adam learns this first hand when a stranger sidles up to him after a youth lacrosse league meeting at the local American Legion, and tells him, “You didn’t have to stay with her.” Then he gives him information to prove that his wife has lied to him about something that matters deeply in their relationship.

It’s not just him who’s receiving such messages, Adam learns in time. There are people who search the internet, ferreting out secrets and blackmailing people, self-righteously believing they’re fighting the good fight against hypocrisy.

And they’re not even the worst ones….

Besides questioning our illusions of security and secrecy in the modern world, The Stranger also raises interesting questions about what they call “hacktivism” nowadays. This book is as relevant as anything you’ll read this year.

It drew me in. It fascinated me. It broke my heart. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

Fade Away, by Harlan Coben

Leave a comment

Myron Bolitar, Harlan Coben’s sports agent mystery hero, is primarily a sports agent and (supposedly secretly) a former FBI agent. Once a top NBA draft pick, almost guaranteed a highly paid career and all the perks, he got injured in a pre-season game and never had the chance to play in a major league game.

But in Fade Away, he is to get his chance. A team owner who is also an old friend asks him to join his team temporarily – not actually to play (much), but to sit on the bench, schmooze with the players, and try to figure out what happened to Greg Downing, one of the stars, who has disappeared.

Myron agrees and begins an investigation that will lead to threats and further murder, and will uncover secrets involving drugs, old 1970s radicals and a betrayal in his own life. The plot gets pretty complicated.

But the great joy of this book – even for someone as apathetic toward sports as me – is Myron’s personal character arc. Though established in his new career, a competent, successful, and even dangerous man, once he’s on the basketball court it’s (emotionally) as if he were a kid again. The passion, the love of the game, the competitive instinct, are all back in full force, and his inevitable disappointment is all the crueler for it. This gave the book a genuine poignancy that made it moving indeed, simply as a piece of literature.

As usual with Coben, there are adult themes, but they’re handled in a fairly civilized manner. Highly recommended.

Authors, Writing

How To Be a Writer

Leave a comment

Harlan Coben talks shop on Speakeasy: “As much as we like to think otherwise, it isn’t the act. Writing isn’t about the process. It is about creating. The joy comes not from the process but from the creation.” He recommends three steps to becoming a writer: inspiration, perspiration, and desperation. These will make you a great writer, or perhaps cure you of the writing bug forever.

Fiction, Reviews

Play Dead, by Harlan Coben

4 Comments

Perhaps with a little embarrassment, author Harlan Coben prefaces this new edition of his first novel with “A Note From the Author.” He begins the note, “Okay, if this is the first book of mine you’re going to try, stop now. Return it. Grab another. It’s okay. I’ll wait.”

Words in season. I like Coben’s books very much, but Play Dead is a classic example of that deadly subgenre, the badly overwritten first novel. One of the many temptations to which unproven authors fall prey is the one to tell the reader too much, to put everything into the book. Clearly, on the evidence of his later work, Coben has learned a lot in the intervening years. But Play Dead (he says in his Note that he left it as it stands because he considers it dishonest to re-write an earlier book) is too long, too verbose, and awkward. It’s like a teenager who’s outgrown his muscles, impressive in his height, but bad in his coordination. Continue reading Play Dead, by Harlan Coben →

Fiction, Reviews

No Second Chance, by Harlan Coben

Leave a comment

I like Harlan Coben better with each novel of his I read. I found No Second Chance a superior thriller, dispensing big doses of those truths of the heart that mean so much to me in a story.

Dr. Marc Seidman was a successful plastic surgeon (the kind who repairs cleft palates for Third World children) when he was shot and nearly killed in his home. He has no memory of his attacker. All he knows is that when he regained consciousness in the hospital, his wife was dead (also from a gunshot wound) and their six-month-old daughter Tara had vanished without a trace.

The police have nothing. Marc himself is a suspect, but only under one of many scenarios, all of them unsatisfactory.

Then there’s a ransom call. He’s to bring a sum of money to a certain location, and not to involve the police. “There will be no second chance.”

In consultation with his wealthy father-in-law, who provides the cash, he decides to bring the police in. The result is disastrous. The money is taken, but Tara is not returned. The kidnappers call to say that’s because they called the cops.

Marc clings to the dream that Tara is alive somewhere. He begins an investigation of his own, bringing in a friend from the past, a former girlfriend recently fired by the FBI.

The plot of this book is extremely convoluted, and (to be honest) objectively unlikely. But the author’s strength is in his examination of the passions, loves, fears and hopes that drive the characters to make their different choices. The story has emotional logic, and it kept me turning the pages, anguishing with the protagonist.

Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

Long Lost, by Harlan Coben

Leave a comment

Long Lost

I didn’t much care for the first Harlan Coben book I read, and it was part of the Myron Bolitar series. But Coben—and the series—have been growing on me, and I liked Long Lost

 very much.

Coben, apparently, has decided to take the series (which has been pretty conventional mysteries up to now) in a new direction—to international thrillers. It would seem a stretch to make a sports agent (that’s Bolitar’s profession) a spy chaser, but Coben accomplishes it pretty deftly (I thought), by the wisest course possible for a writer. Instead of adding novel elements to the formula, he takes an underutilized character he’s already established, and gives her a back story that rears its ugly head to take her (and our hero) into fresh territory. Continue reading Long Lost, by Harlan Coben →