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.
The first thing the author had to do, to make this change in the series, was to shake up Myron Bolitar’s life. In the last couple books, Myron has been living in fairly comfortable semi-domesticity, sharing his life with his girlfriend Ali and her son, about whom he has very paternal feelings. This all comes apart, shockingly, in the first chapters. Ali proves herself essentially intolerant of Myron’s values (that’s how I saw it, anyway), and walks out of his life in anger, to his confusion and grief.
But he has something to divert his interest. His old flame Terese Collins, a mysterious and damaged woman, has called him and asked him to join her in Paris, without explanation. Terese is not someone to ask for help lightly, but Myron refused. Now, with Ali gone, he has no reason not to go.
And in so doing, he walks into a wood chipper.
Terese, it turns out, was married once. She had one child, a daughter, who was killed in a car accident, while Terese was driving. The marriage broke up, and Terese has always blamed herself. Now her husband has been murdered in Paris, and along with his blood at the crime scene, there was a different blood sample, blood identified as coming from a female offspring of his.
His only living child is a son, born to his second wife.
After that, it gets weird. There’s lots of fighting and shooting, and people get arrested, get hurt, and die. And Myron Bolitar, decent man that he is, feels it all.
What I particularly enjoyed in Long Lost was its moral understanding. No, understanding is the wrong word. Coben asks the right questions, and agonizes over them in valid ways (from my perspective, anyway). He deals in a close-up way with the questions of torture and waterboarding, but comes to no facile answers. At one point I was afraid he’d resort to a cliché on the subject of abortion, but he was actually going in a direction I didn’t see coming.
And, as usual, with Coben, extreme foul language was avoided.
Recommended, if you don’t mind having your heart wrung a bit.