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
, the latest Virgil Flowers. Its very setting—a women-only fishing resort in northern Minnesota, frequented by a number of lesbians—guarantees a large degree of sexual tension, and a certain amount of discomfort when a male detective—even a fashionably broad-minded one like Flowers—starts investigating its affairs. 
too, but the other authors’ stories are also excellent.
universe) is that the warlike Kzin race, large creatures very much like intelligent lions (with a sort of Roman/Samurai ethic) were raging across the universe, subduing one intelligent species after another, until they ran into the apparently helpless humans, who’d lived in peace so long they’d forgotten how to fight. But humans, it turned out, are born killers, and once they got their footing again they stopped the Kzin cold. The stories of this volume, except for some flashbacks, involve the time after the Kzin surrender, when a few humans and Kzin on the planet Wunderland are tentatively learning to cooperate. Members of both species are coming to believe the unthinkable—that their clash was actually good for both sides, teaching them new ideas and new sensibilities. 