I realize that impersonating an officer is breaking the law, but here is the thing about being rich: You don’t go to jail for crimes like this. The rich hire a bunch of attorneys who will twist reality in a thousand different ways until reality is made irrelevant.
I like Harlan Coben (generally) as an author, and my perception of his Myron Bolitar novels was that I liked them too – though looking at my old reviews, I see that I cooled toward the later books. Too much political correctness had crept in. It looks like the Bolitar series is finished now (I’d forgotten that Coben married the character off in the last volume), but instead we’ve got a new series about his friend Win Lockhart. I’ve never liked Win much as a character, but for odd reasons I enjoyed the novel, Win quite a lot. And the nature of the main character kept the PC suppressed a bit.
Win Lockhart used to fill the niche in the Bolitar books that I’ve designated the “psycho killer friend.” In many mystery series, your rational, decent hero has a very dangerous friend he can call on when the bad guys threaten and the odds get long. Win was an eccentric example of the PKF. Born to an elite family, exclusively educated, small and effete-appearing, he is nevertheless a master of unarmed and armed combat, the kind of guy who can kill a man twice his size quickly, with his bare hands. I always found Win implausible and affected. But he worked better here, in the first person.
The police call Win to an exclusive Upper West Side apartment building, to a penthouse tower apartment. There, in a room with a murdered man, they have found two items long missing – a Vermeer painting that was stolen from Win’s family years ago, and a custom-made suitcase that once belonged to Win himself. How does Win account for that?
Win knows nothing about how the painting got there, but he had given the suitcase to Patricia, a female cousin of whom he is very fond. He doesn’t believe she murdered this man – whoever he was – but he’s not going to tell the police about it. He’ll investigate the matter himself.
His investigation will take him into a maze of old secrets, secrets related to radical antiwar violence of the days of Vietnam, and dark family secrets that Win thinks he knows about – but does not. Yet.
In the Bolitar books, Win was always presented as a kind of psychopath whose only true relationship was with his friend Myron . Which I found unpersuasive. In Win, presented in the first person, we get further inside him. He proves to be a man of (relatively) normal empathies who was traumatized as a child and whose emotional energy has been diverted into strange channels. This works better for me, though I’m still not sure it’s entirely plausible.
The plot has multiple resolutions, some of them morally problematic. But they satisfied me as a reader.
Also, the author had a chance to trash evangelical Christians, and chose not to. I always appreciate that.
Cautions for the usual stuff.
