Fine read

by Francesca on August 21, 2008

I am not an expert on Harlan Coben, but I know he writes well. I also know that rarely do you get the pieces of his puzzles neatly positioned at the end. His characters do not fall into boxes. Fortunately, they are not such as to involve you emotionally beyond endurance, as they probe the ambiguity of the human moral landscape. I am impressed with the scope of this plot, or one might say these plots, since Coben interweaves a fair number of stories and a fair number of individual people with their fault lines more and more apparent.
We are told in a kind of preface that an attorney's sister, considered the victim of an accident, was actually murdered fourteen years ago. Then we are dropped into the story. Grace, the protagonist, finds a mysterious photo in a pack she has picked up on her way to give her kids a ride home from school. From that point, the characters and their traumatic past lives take over. You've got one really slimy hit man, a couple of wonderful women friends, a mafia boss and his revolting hencemen--really you have everything going in this book. You wonder whether these writers stay awake at night with characters swarming in their brains.