This (good) idea posed, Harlan Coben must flesh it out and this is where the problem quickly arises. To mislead his reader – and he succeeds in spite of himself – he sows clues and multiplies false leads and characters. So much so that we are quickly drowned in an ocean of surnames whose links it is difficult to understand. This is voluntary, of course, since the difficulty for the investigators is to piece together the macabre puzzle. Because the corpses are piling up…
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The writer’s other good idea is to include his audience in the construction of the murders, carefully prepared by his serial killer. The latter, in the first person, recounts his modus operandi, his locations and then his act. Chilling, but effective.
Alas!, we come back to it, by trying to complicate everything, Harlan Coben ends up annoying. The romantic relationships of Myron – who gave birth to a child to his ex-partner who became the wife of Greg-the-false-death –, the supposed lovers of the same Greg, the grieving mothers of the supposed lovers… In short, we get lost in it and the pleasure of reading diminishes with each new false twist. So much so that halfway through the book, rather than rejoicing that there are still as many pages as we have already read, we begin to wonder by what pirouette the writer is going to escape from the trap that he created himself.
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All that for that
And there, a new disappointment: while everything seems insoluble – even if, as we have said, having a billionaire friend who owns a private jet helps you get out of many situations – everything becomes clearer in the space of a few chapters and, in Myron’s brain, all the cogs fit together perfectly. The reader says to himself “all that for that?”. We were expecting a real surprise, a masterful twist and, in the end, we had to settle for yet another psychopath whose motivations are never explained.
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Early fans of the American writer will undoubtedly not shy away from the pleasure of finding Myron Bolitar, a recurring hero from the start (his first appearance dates back to 1995 in Breach of contractpublished by Éditions Fleuve Noir), readers who are a little more demanding will regret a poorly put together and somewhat sloppy plot. Very busy with the adaptations of his books by the Netflix platform, has the master of suspense forgotten to think about literature before thinking about series?
⇒ Beware | Thriller | Harlan Coben | Belfond, 384 pp., €23, digital €16
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