Harlan Coben is the master of engaging plots.

This is not one of his best.

… Still, it kept me going.

7th in the Myron Bolitar series. He reps sports stars and celebrities — but somehow ends up spending more time solving murder mysteries.

His best friend, Windsor Horne Lockwood III (better known as Win), and his assistant at MB SportReps, Esperanza Diaz are both more fascinating characters.

Life isn’t going well for Myron Bolitar. His business is struggling, and his father, recently recovered from a heart attack, is facing his own mortality – and forcing Myron to face it too.

Then Emily Downing, Myron’s college sweetheart, reappears in his life with devastating news: her thirteen-year-old son Jeremy is gravely ill and can be saved only by a bone-marrow transplant – from a donor who has vanished without trace.

Before Myron can absorb this revelation, Emily hits him with an even bigger shocker: Jeremy is Myron’s son, conceived the night before Emily’s wedding to another man.

Staggered by the news, Myron plunges into a search for the missing donor.

But for Myron, finding the only person who can save the boy’s life means cracking open a mystery that involves a broken family, a brutal kidnapping spree, and a cat-and-mouse game between an ambitious reporter and the FBI.

A good read.

The bad guys are really, really bad.

#16 (2018) in the anti-hero Charlie Parker series.

Recent rainfall has exposed a hidden grave in the woods close to Portland, Maine.

Parker is retained by a local lawyer to identify the woman’s body, and establish what happened to a baby that forensics believe may have been born just before she was killed.

Parker’s best guess is that the child may have been adopted locally by whoever buried the woman …

Themes like gender violence and systemic cruelty are woven into the plot.  The plight of women escaping abusive relationships plays a crucial role. 

The highlight for me are Charlie’s entertaining cast of friends: Louis and Angel, a Gay couple who are loyal friends and killers for hire. And his frequent boss, lawyer Moxie Castin, who turns out to be Jewish … ish.

There is a parallel story line of a racist criminal and his very stupid son.

There is a supernatural element in this one, but it doesn’t distract.

Cliff hanger ending. I’ll buy the sequel on Audible.

Crime Fiction Lover review

The 10th book (2017) in the Virgil Flowers series ➙ Deep Freeze.  

Originally disappointed in these Virgil Flowers books, I’ve come to like them. Or … perhaps they got better over the years.

Class reunions: a time for memories — good, bad, and, as Virgil Flowers is about to find out, deadly — in the thrilling new novel in the #1 New York Times-bestselling series

Virgil knows the town of Trippton, Minnesota, a little too well. A few years back, he investigated the corrupt — and as it turned out, homicidal — local school board, and now the town’s back in view with more alarming news: A woman’s been found dead, frozen in a block of ice.

There’s a possibility that it might be connected to a high school class of twenty years ago that has a mid-winter reunion coming up, and so, wrapping his coat a little tighter, Virgil begins to dig into twenty years’ worth of traumas, feuds, and bad blood. In the process, one thing becomes increasingly clear to him. It’s true what they say: High school is murder.

One of the better Sherlock Holmes spinoffs.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994) is the first book in the Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King. It was nominated for the Agatha best novel award 

Sherlock Holmes is well retired at age- 54 in 1915. Keeping bees and studying everything in rural Sussex Downs.

A 15-year-old Jewish-American wonder child — Mary Russell — bumps into the old man in the woods — and the two quickly become odd friends.

Mary becomes a worthy apprentice. Then enters Oxford University in the autumn of 1917.

The book is a series of adventures NOT written up by John Watson.

Click PLAY or watch the author introduce the book on YouTube.

I’ve read a few of the Alex Cross novels now. Junk food. 😀

BUT I was surprised at the complexity and plot twists in his 2022 book.

(Daughter tied the High School record in 400m in this book.)

The bad guy is known as the Family Man — very EVIL.

A serial killer who targets entire families. 

A precise killer, he always moves under the cover of darkness, flawlessly triggering no alarms, leaving no physical evidence.  

Cross and Sampson aren’t the only ones investigating.  

Also in on this most intriguing case is the world’s bestselling true-crime author, who sees patterns everyone else misses.

The writer, Thomas Tull, calls the Family Man murders the perfect crime story. He believes the killer may never be caught.  

Alex Cross books in oder.