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A review by paulabrandon
Darkest Fear by Harlan Coben
4.0
Myron Bolitar is struggling to get his sports agency back up and running when he's pulled back into private eye style work by long-ago lover, Emily Downing. Her son has a terminal illness that can only be cured by a bone marrow transplant, and the only available donor match has disappeared. As an incentive for Myron to find the donor, she drops the bombshell that he is actually the boy's biological father. Myron sets to work, but gets drawn into a messy affair involving the hunt for a serial kidnapper and a super rich family eager to keep their secrets hidden.
Some of Coben's more recent works haven't been up to scratch for me, so it was interesting to go back to the early Myron Bolitar books, before Coben hit the big time with books like Tell No One and Gone For Good. Darkest Fear was the last Bolitar book before Coben started doing standalone books (Bolitar returned about six years later), and it demonstrates his flair for cracking, twisty plots and some decent characterisation. Myron Bolitar is a bit too smart-alecky for my liking, but his discovery at being a father, contrasted with his feelings on facing his own father's mortality, gave the story some additional emotional resonance.
There are contrivances: sports agency partner Esperanza Diaz can find out all sorts of information without us being told how, and some of the supporting characters are too cutesy/larger-than-life. I also didn't like a sequence where they threaten and beat a lawyer to achieve an outcome that we've been shown previously can be achieved without the need for violence. It's only there to add another element to the story's ongoing theme of "does the end justify the means?" and it was silly and unnecessary. I got the theme loud and clear. That was just beating me over the head with it.
But I enjoyed this twisty thriller. I was hooked! Here's hoping some of Coben's newer works that I haven't read yet can recapture this sort of compelling plotting, rather than the nonsense we got in Don't Let Go.
Some of Coben's more recent works haven't been up to scratch for me, so it was interesting to go back to the early Myron Bolitar books, before Coben hit the big time with books like Tell No One and Gone For Good. Darkest Fear was the last Bolitar book before Coben started doing standalone books (Bolitar returned about six years later), and it demonstrates his flair for cracking, twisty plots and some decent characterisation. Myron Bolitar is a bit too smart-alecky for my liking, but his discovery at being a father, contrasted with his feelings on facing his own father's mortality, gave the story some additional emotional resonance.
There are contrivances: sports agency partner Esperanza Diaz can find out all sorts of information without us being told how, and some of the supporting characters are too cutesy/larger-than-life. I also didn't like a sequence where they threaten and beat a lawyer to achieve an outcome that we've been shown previously can be achieved without the need for violence. It's only there to add another element to the story's ongoing theme of "does the end justify the means?" and it was silly and unnecessary. I got the theme loud and clear. That was just beating me over the head with it.
But I enjoyed this twisty thriller. I was hooked! Here's hoping some of Coben's newer works that I haven't read yet can recapture this sort of compelling plotting, rather than the nonsense we got in Don't Let Go.