I love murder mysteries especially when I am travelling and have to sleep alone in the night, of-course I am a little unsettled by the experience but that makes me wake up early the next day :) without an alarm clock. And I needed a new author with a light book to read post my first Kafka. Bought this book from a friend who was moving to a foreign land and was gifting (practically) all her books at throw away prices. I guess this was the only Harlan Coben that I picked up and it became the first from him that I read and it even worked (most of it) to keep me hooked throughout (although I didn't like the convenient ending) and had me finish it in flat three days. As I said, I haven't read nothing from him earlier but just one book is good enough to tell me that he isn't a Christie or Conan Doyle but his cops and detectives plus the protagonist was good enough to keep me guessing. But unfortunately after a terrific start and hooking mid time, the ending and the secret of the missing or dead people was too jumbled up to my taste and sensibilities derailing the total story for me making me call it a stricly average read, nothing special. One very good thing about the book and the Author is that he actually involves the reader in the story, i.e. if he misses a particular word for a situation he uses something regular and request the reader to make do with that :) and a few times he just leaves it to the readers imagination too, the best part? he mentions it that we need to take it with a pinch of salt.
Story of a happy go lucky married couple with two kids and a decade old marriage to boast off, goes totally haywire when an old picture suddenly makes an appearance in their life with five people in it, two of them dead already, one missing, one unknown and the fourth one turns out have an uncanny resemblence with the husband himself who again as fate would have it - goes missing since the picture comes in his hand. How the wife gets the picture and what is wrong with all those characters? There is a parallel track of a serial killer too who only kills "Men" and he decides to confess about the only Girl that he killed to her surviving brother who happens to working for the District Attorney's office. Now these two families too have a common connection and link :) Confusing? it gets better and remains that ways till the reader reaches 70% mark before the things start getting too convenient and jumbled up at the same time. There is even a rock concert in-between which was like a start of the events in the firt place. The plot and idea was simply brilliant but I will say the execution wasn't top notch, somewhere towards the ending the author got confused about how to end it all and who to put in the driver's seat for the entire story and screwed it all for me. But still it wasn't a bad time pass and on top of that it was able to wake me up on time early in the morning to read some more and get to the ending fast. The only good thing about the whole book, if my mom read this she will again get angry on me to love a serial killer and his modus operandi, if I ever recommend this book to anyone, it will be for the silent killer otherwise it isn't worth it.
Have you read Just One Look? or any other Harlan Coben which worked for you? I guess I have only this one from him and I will know in next six months if I have anything else from him :).
PS: Can that be an issue that I read this one as well as its likes in between a Kafka and a Bronte and likes? I don't think so, it should rather work like a charm, isn't it. I gotta give some more tries in between and see how they work.
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