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Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:14:06 GMT

Coben, Harlan (author).
Mar. 2012. 384p. Dutton, hardcover, $27.95 (9780525952275).
REVIEW. First published February 1, 2012 (Booklist).

Coben’s title describes perfectly how the suspense in this tour-de-force stand-alone works. It stays close in an unbelievably sustained way, giving the reader a steady steam of jolts and sinking feelings, as Coben’s three main characters face danger from without and from their own tricky psyches. These three characters are mired in the past. They all got stuck there when a family man with a secret life went missing 17 years ago. Ray is a former AP photojournalist who has become a drunk and a professional bottom-feeder as a photographer for a service that hires fake paparazzi. Coben’s descriptions of Ray’s work (especially for the poor slob who hires him on a succession of first dates) is side-splittingly funny. The second character seems to be doing great—Megan is a wealthy, tennis-playing, SUV-driving suburban mom—but she yearns for her former life as an exotic dancer. And Broome is a detective who became too involved with the family of the missing man and can’t shake the case. When another local man disappears, Broome intensifies the investigation, discovering that 14 men have vanished on Mardi Gras over the last 17 years. Coben excels in descriptions of his characters’ tortured, ruminative inner lives. He also can pull out of their psychological nosedives to deliver some of the most shocking action scenes in current crime fiction. Once again, Coben uses the dives of Atlantic City as a backdrop, and what he does with the six-story pink construction known as Lucy the Elephant is worthy of Hitchcock. Satisfying on every level.

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Coben’s stand-alone thrillers are as close as one can come in publishing to sure-thing best-sellers, even without the full-court marketing press this one will have behind it.

— Connie Fletcher

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