Well, he’s certainly one of the best! There are a lot of great writers in this genre and we’re looking at a lot of them but Harlan Coben is right up there with the top writers in the genre. Of course, he’s not the best because Robert B Parker has that position but, to be honest with you, he is close. I’ve told you already about a flight to or from Cyprus (I can’t remember which) when a colleague alerted me to a few authors I hadn’t come across before and the first one he mentioned was Harlan Coben. I hadn’t heard of him but I started reading his books and I was converted! As you would expect, it is the Myron Bolitar series which I particularly like because I am a big fan of Myron and I see him up there with Parker’s Spenser and Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole. This is what I mean about concentrating on the characters and Myron is one of the best. A top-class basketball player whose career is brought to a halt by a deliberate and devastating foul on his knee, he then resurrects himself as a publicity agent and private investigator. There are eleven books in the series, the first being ‘Deal Breaker’, published in 1995, and the most recent ‘Home’, published in 2016. I liked all of them although I would probably not recommend reading them all at once. Coben has written many stand-alone novels and they can be read in any order so intersperse them in amongst the Myron series!
As well as Myron, that series also features Myron’s assistant and friend, Esperanza Diaz, and the quirky, Win or Windsor Horne Lockwood III, who is the main character in Coben’s most recent book ‘Win’. He is an acquired taste and I review the book in another piece. In addition to Esperanza and Win, we also get to know Myron’s family and, as I’ve said already, he is one of my favourite characters. However, for me, Harlan Coben is a bit different from my other favourite authors. I always say that it is the characters who do it for me rather than the plots but with Coben that is not so much the case. I’ve already said how much I like Myron Bolitar but that is pretty much it as far as regular characters are concerned. Yes, we have three books featuring Mickey Bolitar, Myron’s nephew, but, having tried one, I don’t think these are really for me. I would describe the one I’ve read as ‘teen fiction’ and I know that it is unfair to speak like that about the work of such a great author but that’s my view. We recently saw a book called ‘the Boy from the Woods’ which was pretty good and while it was a one-off, I think there might be scope to see more featuring that character.
However, Harlan Coben has also produced a cornucopia of stand-alone books and I would recommend any of them. I’ve already said I find a lot of novels in our genre as being formulaic but Coben always seems to be able to come up with something clever and original which can stand by itself as a great story. Try any of them! Tell No One is terrific and there is also a great film based on it but Play Dead, No Second Chance, Gone for Good and Hold Tight are all great as well. Just try any of them and I guarantee you won’t be disappointed! He is a master in the field!