It’s taken me a while to get around to reviewing Harlan
Coben’s latest. Not due to any reluctance on my part, but just due to life
getting in the way. But it reproaches me each time I see it on my shelf, so
today is the day.
Coben started out writing a series of mysteries starting
Myron Bolitar, former Duke basketball star turned sports agent/sleuth. He then wrote a boatload of stand-alone
mysteries, each one of which manages to pull me in from the first page.
With Live Wire,
Coben returns to Myron Bolitar and his world of crazy misfits. In his latest
case, Suzze T, former tennis star, now the pregnant wife of a rock star, asks
for help. After posting the picture of her baby’s sonogram on Facebook she received
an ominous message: “Not his.” Now her husband has run off, and she desperately
needs to find him to explain.
The case takes an unexpected twist when Myron learns that
the person who posted the message was his sister-in-law, Kitty. Kitty and Brad
Bolitar had seemingly dropped off the face of the earth some years before after
a fight with Myron in which some unforgivable words were exchanged. Now Myron’s
father is dying, and wants his second son found.
The book is a solid mystery, despite its rather confusing
plot. Where it fell apart for me was in the character of Bolitar’s sidekick,
Win Lockwood. Win is basically a sociopath, but entertainingly so: promiscuous,
cold, but always willing to have Myron’s back. As he ages, however, his
promiscuity and detachment have become less entertaining and more pathetic, so
that in this latest, he came across as just a dirty old man. (Though the two
women he was with, beautiful Asian models named Mee and Yu, made for some
humorous puns.)
Coben still writes up a storm, and his latest, though not
his best, still makes for a good read.
No comments:
Post a Comment