Tag Archives: Harlan Coben

#BookReview ‘Found’ by @HarlanCoben #crime #YA

1 Reply

September. A sunny day in Paris and I needed a book to read on the Eurostar train home. I needed a page turner. I searched my Kindle. What was required was Harlan Coben. I started to read Found, Coben’s latest UK release, which I thought was the new Myron Bolitar story. Except, it isn’t. Harlan CobenFound is the third in the Mickey Bolitar YA [young adult] series. I didn’t know this series existed. Mickey Bolitar is Myron’s nephew.  I guess the two M’s got me confused… oh well. Found may be a YA novel but that doesn’t stop the story from being gripping, in true Coben fashion this really rattled along. Ideal for a train journey.
Mickey is Myron Bolitar’s nephew who, surprise surprise, is a basketball player and amateur detective. This is story three in the series, and I did need to know the back story. But Mr Coben is very efficient at filling that in without stopping the story moving forward.
Two storylines are woven together. On Mickey’s basketball team, one player moves away suddenly, another is dropped from the team for taking steroids. Mickey investigates. Meanwhile, continued from book two in the series, one of Mickey’s friends is in hospital after an adventure when the four friends – Mickey, Spoon, Ema and Rachel – solve a mystery. It appears now though that this mystery is not completely solved.
The quartet combines to track down a missing teen and discover the truth of what happened to Mickey’s father. In true thriller fashion, it starts out with the two stories being completely separate but in the end they overlap. I knew the overlap was coming, but couldn’t see where.

Read my review of a Myron Bolitar novel by Harlan Coben:-
ONE FALSE MOVE #5MYRONBOLITAR

If you like this, try:-
‘Wilderness’ by Campbell Hart
‘Snow White Must Die’ by Nele Heuhaus
‘Nightfall’ by Stephen Leather

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview FOUND by @HarlanCoben https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-1ds via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘One False Move’ by @HarlanCoben #crime #basketball

10 Replies

A strapline across the top of the front cover says ‘A Myron Bolitar novel’. It meant nothing to me. I have never heard of Myron Bolitar. I have heard of Harlan Coben though, but know nothing about him except that he writes crime books and is extremely popular. His name sounds Scandinavian, but this is US crime not Scandi-crime. The book’s been sitting on my bookshelf for ages, a charity shop purchase, waiting for the battery of my Kindle to flicker and die. It died, so I picked up One False Move and read it in two days. Harlan CobenMr Coben knows how to make you turn the pages. He nails a character description in a few sparse lines: “Norm Zuckerman was approaching seventy and as CEO of Zoom, a megasize sports manufacturing conglomerate, he had more money than Trump. He looked, however, like a beatnik trapped in a bad acid trip… Che Guevara lives and gets a perm.” So we have Norm’s name, job, professional standing, age, physical description, financial worth and personal style – in three sentences.
Bolivar is a sports agent. There seemed to be all sorts of back story going on which meant nothing to me and didn’t affect my enjoyment of the story. Next time my Kindle flickers and dies, I will pick up another book by Harlan Coben. Bolivar’s new client runs into trouble – it reminded me of my father who used to watch the opening titles of The Rockford Files, the one where Jim’s answerphone clicks on a leaves a message saying there’d been a murder or someone had disappeared. Dad used to say, “It is dangerous being a friend of Rockford, everyone he knows gets murdered.” It seems that everyone Myron Bolitar knows runs into trouble too.
The fact that the context of the story is basketball wasn’t what drew me to the book, but the sport didn’t matter. I wanted to know what happened to the characters. It’s the fifth novel in the series.
This is a roundabout way of saying, I enjoyed One False Move.

Read my review of a young adult novel by Harlan Coben:-
FOUND #3MICKEYBOLITAR

If you like this:-
‘Snow White Must Die’ by Nele Neuhaus
‘Jellyfish’ by Lev D Lewis
‘Dead Simple’ by Peter James

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview ONE FALSE MOVE by @HarlanCoben http://wp.me/p5gEM4-18o via @SandraDanby