Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: Think Twice by Harlan Coben

 

Think Twice by Harlan Coben is the newest title about Myron Bolitar. After turning out seven books between 1995 and 2000 featuring sports agent Bolitar, Coben branched out into stand-alone thrillers, only occasionally re-visiting his series character. Finally in Home, published in 2016, Bolitar hung up his agent hat and left New York. I thought we had seen the last of him but eight years later, he is back in New York, trying to resurrect his sports agent business.

Two FBI agents have inexplicably requested an interview with Myron and his long-time friend Windsor Horne Lockwood III. They are investigating the murder of a 1990s supermodel for which her estranged husband was being held. Neither Myron nor Win know any of the individuals involved and Myron is stunned when the agents want to know where their former client Greg Downing is. Since Downing died three years previously, neither Myron nor Win has an answer to their question. But Downing’s DNA has surfaced at the Callister crime scene and law enforcement not unreasonably wants to know why.

Downing had never terminated his contract with Myron, and Myron believes he still has an obligation to act as Downing’s agent and attorney, so he begins searching for further evidence that Downing is alive. His search takes him first of all to Downing’s ex-wife, Myron’s first love, which leads him down all sorts of rabbit holes and across the country.

Interspersed with the investigation the story brings the various character arcs up to date. Win is still running his financial services company and pursuing his unregenerate lifestyle, while Esperanza, Myron’s former partner, has joined an all-female law firm. Myron’s parents are retired and living in Florida. His warm affectionate relationship with them has always been a highlight of the series. His friendship with Win remains as close as ever, with sociopath Win demonstrating more attachment to Myron than I remember seeing in earlier books.

Slickly plotted with smooth pacing, polished writing, and relentless action. I am happy to see Myron is back in fine fettle and other fans of the series will be too.

 

·       Publisher: ‎Grand Central Publishing; First Edition (May 14, 2024)

·       Language: ‎English

·       Hardcover: ‎368 pages

·       ISBN-10: ‎1538756315

·       ISBN-13: ‎978-1538756317

 

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3VRuPZG 

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2024 

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: No Second Chance by Harlan Coben

I can’t keep up with Harlan Coben’s prodigious output but I try to read his books when they come my way. No Second Chance (Dutton, 2003) ended up in my hands recently and captured my attention. In classic Coben style I was plunged from the first page into a crisis: Dr. Marc Seidman awakens from a days-long coma. He was shot in his kitchen and left for dead. He recalls nothing at all of the attack. His wife was fatally wounded, and his six-month-old daughter is missing. Even worse, if it can be, the police first on the scene were unaware that there was a baby in the house and thus the search for her was delayed.

The police find that Seidman was injured with one gun and his wife was killed with one belonging to Seidman, which as far as he knew was in a locked box to which few people had access. Not a trace of the infant is found. Seidman is beside himself when he is well enough to understand what happened. He begins searching for his daughter while the police look for suspects and, when they find none, turn their attention to Seidman as the possible killer. Why he would have gravely wounded himself in the process is a question that remains unanswered in their theory.

In the meantime Seidman’s wealthy father-in-law receives a ransom note for the return of his granddaughter. Seidman is to deliver the money as directed. Any deviation from the instructions will result in the loss of his child forever. There would be no second chance for him.

Nothing goes as planned during the hand-off and the baby is not returned. Seidman, not quite rational by this time, begins his own search extraneous to that of the police, involving a range of friends current and past. He finds an unexpected ally in an extremely kind stranger who is devoted to his own children and was devastated to learn of Seidman’s lost daughter.

As always, Coben delivers a solid read. Plenty of action with an engrossing plot, and primary characters that I can believe in. I loved the ending, which is as unexpected as it is deeply gratifying.

 

·         Publisher: ‎ Dutton Adult; 1st edition (April 1, 2003)

·         Language: ‎ English

·         Hardcover: ‎ 352 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎ 0525947299

·         ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0525947295

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2023 

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Lesa's Book Critiques: THE MATCH BY HARLAN COBEN

 Lesa's Book Critiques: THE MATCH BY HARLAN COBEN

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Boy from the Woods by Harlan Coben

In the newest thriller from Harlan Coben, The Boy from the Woods, we meet Wilde, who was discovered as a child living on his own in the forests of New Jersey. His parents could not be located and he grew up with a kind foster family. After a military career, he settles in his hometown where he has an on/off relationship with the widow of his childhood best friend, who was killed in a car accident. The best friend’s son tells Wilde and his grandmother, a well-known criminal lawyer, about a bullied classmate who has disappeared. Wilde searches for her, finds her, she returns to school for a week, and she disappears again. Her father isn’t worried and the police consider her a runaway. When her classmate, the son of a television producer, disappears, the two are linked, until the ransom note for the son arrives, asking for early video tapes that will supposedly prove criminal activity by a presidential hopeful with a cultlike following. All sorts of echoes of the current political environment in the U.S.

It’s easy to get distracted from the missing and kidnapped teens story line as there are lots of threads to follow in various subplots, one of them is from Coben’s 2019 thriller Runaway. A brief one is Wilde’s purchase of a DNA testing kit in hopes of identifying his family. I was a little surprised this line wasn’t pursued earlier when the authorities were looking for his parents. Again, as in Runaway, there is an indirect reference to Windsor Horne Lockwood III from Coben’s Myron Bolitar series.

The bullied teenager and her savage tormentors are depressingly familiar. No matter how much lip service parents and school administrators give to anti-bullying sentiments, abusive situations are alive and well in high schools. Not as many curves and twists as in Runaway and a little unfocused in its plot, this tale still has several surprises and the final one is a doozy.

Starred review from Library Journal.

 

·         Hardcover: 384 pages

·         ISBN-13: 978-1538748145

·         Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (March 17, 2020)

·         Language: English

 

Aubrey Hamilton ©2020

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Lesa's Book Critiques: The Boy from the Woods by Harlan Coben

Lesa's Book Critiques: The Boy from the Woods by Harlan Coben

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Run Away by Harlan Coben

Run Away (Grand Central Publishing, 2019) is the most recent thriller from Harlan Coben, whose Myron Bolitar series was a fixture on the 1990s amateur sleuth lists. With the new century Coben has turned to elaborately plotted stand-alone thrillers; his latest has more twists and hairpin turns than two or three roller coasters combined.

Simon Greene, a successful financial manager in metropolitan New York City, does not know where he went wrong. His oldest daughter Paige seemed fine until she started college. There, she got in with the wrong crowd, started taking drugs, and disappeared. He’s never given up looking for her. His neighbor tells Simon he thinks he saw Paige in New York’s Central Park. Simon finds her but her boyfriend keeps him from taking her home. Paige disappears during the fracas that follows, and shortly thereafter the confrontation between Simon and the boyfriend, filmed by tourists in the park, goes viral on the internet, creating a legal and PR nightmare for Simon.   

Simon and his wife Ingrid start searching for Paige on their own, naively looking for her drug dealer in his lair in a confrontation that anyone should know wouldn’t go particularly well. Interwoven with this thread are descriptions of the activities of a pair of paid assassins that go to great lengths to ensure each kill cannot be linked to any of the others. They are being tracked by a determined private investigator named Elena Ramirez, who is trying to figure out what the pattern is in their choice of targets to protect potential future victims. Eventually both story lines merge but it takes awhile.

After a comparatively slow start that sets the stage for the story, the action never stops, galloping headlong until the very last paragraph. There are some great secondary characters, such as Cornelius, the owner of the apartment house where Paige lived. Devoted fans of the Myron Bolitar series will catch the indirect reference to Bolitar’s friend Windsor Horne Lockwood III early in the book.

Starred review from Library Journal.

·         Hardcover: 384 pages

·         Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; First Edition (March 19, 2019)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1538748460

·         ISBN-13: 978-1538748466

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Mystery Fanfare: Harlan Coben's The Five on Netflix

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