Another Wild Ride With Coben

Missing You by Harlan Coben
2014
Reviewed by Diane K.M.
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars


I have a weakness for Harlan Coben thrillers. Every time I pick up a Coben novel, I get gripped by the story and race through the book, ignoring everything around me.

"Missing You" was no different. It follows Kat Donovan, an NYPD detective, who is investigating the case of a missing woman, but she's also secretly trying to figure out who murdered her father almost 20 years ago. (Yes, yes, the proliferation of crime TV shows means it's become a cop trope that an officer is haunted by a parent's homicide, but just roll with it.)

Anyway, Kat is working multiple leads, one of which involves her ex-boyfriend, Jeff, who might be mixed up in something illegal. 

The plot sprints along, and I gobbled up half the book in one sitting. Three-fourths of the way through I texted my Coben-reading buddy and asked WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?? But I should have known that everything comes together in the end. Wowser.

Sorry this review is so light on details, but to give more would take all the fun out of it. If this is your first Coben, you're in for a wild ride. 

Favorite Quote:
"We all have our demons. But men? They have them much worse. The world tells them that they are the leaders and great and macho and have to be big and brave and make a lot of money and lead these glamorous lives. But they don't, do they? Look at the men in this neighborhood. They all worked too many hours. They came home to noisy, demanding homes. Something was always broken they needed to fix. They were always behind on the house payments. Women, we get it. Life is about a certain kind of drudgery. We are taught not to hope or want too much. Men? They never get that."

Three Characters Haunted by an Event from the Past

Reviewed by James L. Thane
Three of five stars


I first tumbled to Harlan Coben very early in his career when a friend recommended the first or second book in his Myron Bolitar series. I enjoyed the Bolitar books and found Myron to be an unusual but engaging protagonist who almost always found himself in the midst of an interesting plot.

After writing a number of these books, Coben began writing stand-alone thrillers, and I followed dutifully along. Some of these books I liked a lot; others I thought did not work as well, usually because the author insisted on piling one implausible plot twist on top of another until the reader could no longer suspend disbelief and the entire structure collapsed in ruins.

Stay Close falls into the middle of the pack of Coben's books; it's okay, but it's certainly not his best effort. The book involves three central characters who are united by their ties to a terrifying night seventeen years earlier when a man named Stewart Green disappeared. Two people saw Green in an isolated area, dead or very close to it. But neither reported the discovery; the body was never found, and Green is still officially listed as a missing person.

Ray Levine was once a world-class photographer, but he made a number of bad choices that came to a head that fateful night and now he has spiraled down to rock bottom, drinking heavily, living in a crappy apartment and working as a fake paparazzi. Jack Broome is the police detective who can't let go of the case that has haunted him all these years, and Megan Pierce is the suburban wife who's "living the ultimate soccer-mom fantasy and hating it."

Megan is also a woman with a very dark past that she escaped on that night seventeen years ago. After all this time, she decides to pull the curtain back just a bit for a quick glimpse into her former life. Just as she does, though, another man goes missing in the same way as Stewart Green. Everyone involved in the earlier case will be sucked into the new one, with potentially disastrous consequences for all of them.

As is usually the case in one of Harlan Coben's thrillers, this one moves fairly swiftly along, but I had a hard time moving with it. Unhappily, this is one of those books in which the main protagonist, in this case Megan Pierce, makes one astoundingly stupid decision after another, which is the only thing that allows the plot to advance beyond the first chapter. But after seventy-five pages or so, I simply stopped caring what happened to the woman. My attitude by that point was that a person as stupid as she deserved whatever bad things might happen to befall her. And once you stop caring about a book's central character, you usually stop caring about the book itself.

It doesn't help that at some points the writing seems unusually clunky and that the book contains a couple of villains who are simply unbelievable from the outset. By the last hundred pages or so, the book finally gets some traction and the conclusion is fairly satisfying, but by then it almost seems too little too late. Again, this is not a bad book, but a person new to the work of Harlan Coben would probably want to start with another of his efforts.

Wouldn't A Restraining Order Have Been Easier?

Six Years
Harlan Coben

Dutton Adult 

Available Now

Reviewed By Kemper

3.5 out of 5 stars.

Jake Sanders thought he’d met the love of his life in Natalie, but she dumped him abruptly to marry her old boyfriend, Todd.  At the wedding, Natalie made Jake promise that he’d never try to contact her again.  Six years passed as Jake taught political science at a small New England college, but he never got over Natalie.   When he comes across Todd’s obituary, Jake thinks that his promise no longer applies so he heads to the funeral to bang the widow pay his respects.

However, Jake gets a big surprise.  The widow at the service is not Natalie, and Todd had been married to this woman for years before the wedding that Jake witnessed.  Adding to the weirdness, it turns out that Todd was murdered, and it’s as if Natalie never existed.  Jake starts digging into the past to find Natalie and uncovers a lot of very dangerous secrets. 

Here we’ve got a high concept thriller by a very capable genre writer, and it works well in that context.  I particularly enjoyed the early part of the book when a confused Jake can’t even find someone who admits remembering Natalie or confirm a single fact about her.  That gave the whole thing a slightly creepy feel.  

However, there were a couple of factors that weighed the whole thing down.  As a college professor who was a bar bouncer in his youth, Jake makes a pretty good amateur sleuth character in that he’s smart and can hold his own in a fist fight while still seeming over his head.  The problem is that the whole plot hinges on this idea that even though Jake has pined for Natalie since he lost her, he was able keep his promise to the point where he never even tried to do a Google search or look her up on Facebook once in six years.  Yet when he’s trying to track her down and he gets several valid warnings that he could do her harm by looking, he keeps going.  There’s some internal character conflict there that Coben does try to have Jake rationalize, but I never really buy it.  Also, there’s just too much suspension of disbelief required at a couple of points.   None of this was enough to make me dislike the book, but it did cut down on my enjoyment of it.

It’s a competent thriller with a nice hook to it, but frankly, I had a good idea of the explanation for what happened to Natalie fairly early in the book.  I would have liked a few more surprises along the way and some more consistent behavior from the main character who claims to be doing it all for love.

Also posted at Goodreads.

Kemper's Book Blog