Long Lost :: Reviewed by David Forsmark

In the past decade, Harlan Coben has become one of the world's best-selling authors. His suspense novels (such as Tell No One, which was filmed as a very good French thriller) usually feature ordinary people caught up in webs of intrigue. Car chases in a Coben book are more likely to feature minivans than Aston Martins or red Ferarris.

His series about Myron Bolitar — a one-time basketball star who metamorphasized into a sports agent after a horrible knee injury, then became a P.I. on the side — has him increasingly learning to be a dangerous guy. Myron's new-found skill set serves him well in Coben's latest No. 1 bestseller, Long Lost (Dutton, $27.95) as he helps an old flame dodge bad guys in Paris who probably killed her CNN reporter/husband — and who seem to be accompanied by the woman's presumed-dead daughter.

Long Lost is one of those books that you can't talk about for more than a minute without spoiling a plot point. You also won't be able to put it aside for much more than a minute once you start.

Unlike the infamous DHS report, which seems to hint that the FBI should cruise around looking for cars with pro-life bumper stickers to surveil, Myron has a very non-Manhattan cocktail circuit response to a pro-life website: "It's kind of right wing, but not extreme."

And while Homeland "Security" is looking for pro-lifers who use babies as a front to recruit car-bombers, Coben reminds us that there is an expansionist ideology that views women's wombs as subject to the whims of men to produce cannon fodder for the cause — and it's not the Christian right or even neocon bogeymen.

I've already said too much. Just grab Coben's latest, and lose yourself — it's the best thriller of its type since Andrew Klavan's Empire of Lies.

receive the latest by email: subscribe to david forsmark's free mailing list