Live Wire by Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben owed me. Last year, in the wisdom of any publishing house sitting on a gold-mine of an author, Coben’s New Zealand publisher reissued his 20-year-old first novel, Play Dead, and sent review copies far and wide to get the publicity ball rolling.

Having read and enjoyed several of the New Jersey-based writer’s later works (particularly The Woods and Caught), I was all set for a rough-and-ready version of his polished recent thrillers. What I got was a confused, hyperkinetic pile of suspenseless mush, which was only redeemed by the delightfully apologetic foreword by Coben, who appears as conscious as anyone of how far he has come.

Naturally, I wanted him to make it up to me with a stonkingly clever, unpredictable and scintillating story, all the better if it contained razor-sharp one-liners and hermetic 80s glam-rock stars.

Who knew he would produce just that? What he has arrived with, in 2011, is perhaps his best production yet, not only in the near-flawless structure (the arcs, both character and plot, cry out for film adaptation), but also in tone, with the return of his stalwart protagonist and star of 10 of his 20 books to date, Myron Bolitar.

Bolitar, with his steel-trap mind and similarly unconquerable nerve, is like the brother-by-another-mother of Lee Child’s staunch hero Jack Reacher: both men are prone to bouts of fierce loyalty, though never to the point of foolishness, and skilled at finding creative ways out of trouble when their gift of the gab proves insufficient.

In Live Wire (the titular pun becomes amusingly apparent toward the end of the book), the set-up demands the best of Bolitar’s skills as a sports agent, friend, and investigator. A former tennis star, Suzze T, and her rock-star husband Lex Ryder (half of 80s duo Horse Power) are expecting a baby. Happy news, you would think, but when Suzze visits her former agent Bolitar, upset over an anonymous Facebook post questioning the baby’s paternity, it becomes clear that not everyone connected with the couple is thrilled by the prospective miracle of birth.

Bolitar’s loyalty reflex kicks in, leading him into the heart of one of the most gripping, cleverly paced and downright funny suspense stories I have read in many months.

Among the well-drawn cast that appears in the course of Bolitar’s probes are his sister-in-law Kitty, his nephew Mickey, his priapic and erstwhile business partner Win, assorted villains who find themselves uncomfortable recipients of Bolitar’s unique sense of justice, and two men conspicuous by their absence – Lex Ryder’s former musical partner, Gabriel Wire, who hasn’t been seen in public since the mystery-shrouded death of a young woman in his company many years ago, and Bolitar’s brother, from whom he has long been estranged.

It’s a rollicking story that in the hands of a lesser writer could swing right off its axis, but the Coben of Play Dead bears no likeness at all to today’s master.

I did wonder whether the satirical suspense writer Carl Hiaasen, should he read Live Wire, might object to the tonal similarities between this novel and the best of his own work, but I suspect like most readers he’ll be grinning too hard to care.

4 / 5 stars: Top contender for thrilling piss-take of the year. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Play Dead by Harlan Coben

It is rather curious that Harlan Coben opens Play Dead, a 20^th-anniversary reissue of the first of his mystery thrillers, with an introduction that hints at its unreadability. Is he being falsely modest? Self-deprecating? Or trying, in kindness and good faith, to guide the reader towards one of his later, better-constructed works?

That he is telling the truth in stating that he did not make any rewrites is clear. Play Dead is laden with cliché and soap opera-like interior monologues, creating a congestion that takes the book to an excessive 500-plus pages. Although these problems automatically relegate it to the thriller D-list, with adjusted expectations it is worth ploughing on for the pay-off.

What of the plot? We meet Laura Ayars, a preternaturally beautiful former model who now runs a successful business, and David Baskin, a basketball superstar who plays for the Boston Celtics, on their honeymoon in Australia. Madly in love, they have eloped after a whirlwind courtship and are unaccompanied by any relatives or friends.

The marriage is only days old when David heads out for an ocean swim – and fails to return. When a night has passed and there is no sign of him, a panicked Laura calls TC, a Boston police detective and David’s best friend, for help. TC gets on the next plane, but his best efforts fail. David remains missing, presumed drowned.

From here, the plot doesn’t so much thicken as veer wildly. Between an opening prologue involving an unidentified murder 29 years before David’s disappearance; brief passages depicting a unnamed character’s recovery from extensive cosmetic surgery; the apparently groundless resistance to the marriage by each spouse’s parents; and the emergence of a new basketball star with a game uncannily similar to David’s, the experience of reading Play Dead is like bumbling your way along a dangerously unkempt garden path. You know where you’re going, but getting there is a frustrating task.

I don’t want to be unduly harsh towards Coben: Play Dead indisputably shows the promise that he has since fulfilled, and for all the laboured unctuousness of the exposition he has evidently taken care with the plotting. The twist in the tale for which he is known is present here.

There are little delights to savour. The extraordinary obtuseness of one of his main characters, who can most charitably be described as as dumb as a bag of hammers, eventually stops being annoying and instead enhances the daffiness of the entire enterprise.

That, in the end, should be the expectation for what you might get from an afternoon with Play Dead – a residual sense of charming battiness. There are some ugly scenes and nasty people, but also firm friendships and true love of the candyfloss-and-paper-hearts variety. It’s worth reading for the schlock factor, and for the reminder that all good genre writers have to start somewhere, and a lot more skill and effort goes into creating a well-written thriller than the writers would have us know.

(If Play Dead leaves you with a weird filminess on the roof of your skull, wash it away with the sharpness of Caught, Coben’s 2010 thriller involving social media and missing children. It features every virtue and none of the flaws of his debut.)

 1 / 5 Stars: Days of Our Lives on crack.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Caught by Harlan Coben

Until a few years ago I was relatively unversed in the crime/thriller/mystery genre, aside from the sedate likes of Agatha Christie and P D James: the modern megasellers (James Patterson, Jonathan Kellerman et al) hovered in my peripheral vision in other domains of the bookshop.

It was Harlan Coben’s compelling 2007 novel The Woods that at last introduced me to the sophisticated modern thriller, in which the reader finds a plot with multiple connected sub-plots, crime depicted in grisly detail, unforeseeable twists, and hard-bitten characters who, despite their seen-it-all-before miens, are invariably shocked by the new chaos they encounter as they lurch toward an unpredictable climax and denouement.

A common feature of the postmodern thriller is the clever use of science and technology – Kathy Reichs, Val McDermid and Karin Slaughter are handy at this – and these days the protagonist is as likely to be a forensic pathologist or crime-scene investigator as a detective inspector.

In Coben’s 17^th novel, Caught, he sticks to his knitting with a crackerjack story that makes a swift take-off. The scene is set with two parallel plotlines that initially don’t intersect – the disappearance of a 17-year-old high school student, and a sting operation by a tabloid reporter who tracks online sexual predators and exposes them in a national news programme.

In the opening chapter, the reporter, Wendy Tynes, follows social worker Dan Mercer to a house to which he has been summoned by a troubled teenage girl. She busts him, but the ‘exposure’ turns out to be less than definite – though there is little immediate evidence that Dan is in fact a child abuser, the repercussions for both Dan and Wendy are swift and calamitous.

Out of a job and still uncertain as to the truth about the social worker, Wendy finds her curiosity further piqued when Dan calls her, telling her he was set up and that they need to meet in person. He summons her to a trailer park in rural New Jersey where he has gone into hiding, and she finds him sporting mysterious bruises and a bad dye job. Before Wendy can learn more from Dan the plot thickens, as the father of another of Dan’s alleged victims storms the scene and takes what he believes to be revenge.

Coben uses this turn in the plot to pose the novel’s key questions: who are the real villains of the piece, what crimes have they committed, and has the missing girl, Haley McWaid, fallen victim to foul play or simply decided, on a teenage whim, to absent herself from ordinary life?

The latter query appears to be answered when the local sheriff’s scouring of Dan’s former motel room turns up Haley McWaid’s iPhone – with the plotted coordinates of a specific area of the local park. A connection between the two storylines has thus been established, and Coben ramps up the action with inspired digging by Wendy, who finds that Dan and his four college housemates have each experienced the destruction of their personal reputation in the past couple of years.

Dan’s avowal that he was a victim now seems justified – but who is targeting the men, and why?

To say more would be to spill the best beans of Caught, which doesn’t rewrite the rules of the crime thriller but more than meets the requirements of fans of the genre and this writer. Coben’s talent lies in pacing and structure – it is harder than it seems to dive between disparate narratives while engaging rather than confusing the reader – and in subtly guiding the reader’s interpretation of each character while withholding just enough crucial data to produce the requisite big bang. Very satisfying. 

3 / 5 Stars: No molds are being broken here, but it’s a pacy thriller from a highly competent practitioner.  Click here to view other Easy Mix book reviews