I still haven’t read any of Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar books (I’ll get to them sooner or later, I’m sure), but I just read his most recent stand-alone, a “suburban noir”, as someone dubbed them, called CAUGHT.
As usual, one of the appeals of a Coben novel is trying to figure out how he’s going to make all the seemingly unrelated plotlines fit together. In this one you’ve got a seemingly decent guy exposed by a tabloid TV program as a pedophile, a missing teenage girl, embezzlement, drug dealing, angst over the economy and people losing their jobs, an execution-style murder, various cops and lawyers, and secrets going back for decades causing trouble in the present in Ross Macdonald-like fashion. Oh, and blogging. But also as usual, Coben manages to make it all make sense, in a series of twists and revelations that carry through all the way to the end of the book, and does so with likeable characters and prose that races right along. CAUGHT is a solidly entertaining novel, and if you’ve enjoyed Coben’s other novels, or if you haven’t tried one yet, it’s well worth reading.
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3 comments:
Sounds pretty much like what's on the news every night, a rehash of I hardly want to read. You applied (second hand) the label noir, so it is a book in which the characters all spiral into doom and despair regardless of their actions. Like I want to read that. Bah.
Yeah, I'm a little grumpy today, (read my blog) but terms is terms.
The books of Coben's that I've read haven't been hardcore noir. There's always a reasonably hopeful resolution, although not for everybody in the plot. There's also a little humor, mostly in asides directed at society's foibles. But overall they can be pretty bleak.
I'm off to read your blog right now.
Dear Mr. Reasoner,
I am from Bombay, India, and your most recent "follower" yet. I cherish books and comics, and have a decent collection of my own, more of the latter. I have enjoyed a few of your posts so far and intend reading the others soon. I am amazed by the depth of your knowledge of books, particularly crime and western, but then you are an accomplished writer and novelist. I believe last year you read some 125-odd books. Would you consider writing about your reading habits? For instance, the process of selecting and acquiring the books you hope to read, the time you spend reading every day, assimilating what you have read and then putting them up on your blog, perhaps even a regular list of interesting books for the rest of us to read...you get the drift.
I wish you good luck and more.
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