Every romance novel on the face of the earth would have you believe that there is “one true love” out there somewhere, a fated meeting just waiting for two pairs of eyes to lock together across a crowded room. It didn’t quite happen that way for Jake Fisher – Natalie Avery was wearing sunglasses the first time he laid eyes on her – but it was damned close. The two spent a couple of delirious months together at adjacent artistic retreats in upstate Vermont, long enough for Jake to decide Natalie was the fabled “one.” And then she dumped him – dumped him hard one day and sent him an invitation to her wedding the next. When the ceremony was concluded, she made Jake promise that he would never, ever contact her and her new husband.
| For Six Years he kept that promise, until one day he happened on the notice of her husband’s death. Six long years in which not a day went by that he didn’t wonder where she was; six years without a single Google search, six years spent never scouring Facebook. He kept the promise – but he now had some wiggle room: Natalie had said, “Promise me you’ll leave us alone”… and there was no “us” any more.
And so Fisher went to the husband’s funeral; only to find that the widow wasn’t Natalie, had no idea who Natalie was, and was certain that the man asking her these questions was bonkers. He was beginning to think so too, until he found a stranger sitting in his living room in the middle of the night… a stranger who was looking for Natalie, too, and didn’t seem to care who got hurt in the process – including Jake Fisher. And things only got weirder after that… |
Harlan Coben’s latest effort is a standalone novel; with only the most tenuous of connections to the world of his series hero, Myron Bolitar (although his protagonist is about the same size). This one falls squarely in the genre of “reluctant amateur detective,” since Fisher is neither a cop nor a PI: he’s a college political science professor – head of the department, even.
Coben has most recently been writing YA novels featuring Myron Bolitar’s nephew Mickey, but there’s nothing here to suggest that he’s been slacking off on the grown-up stuff. Six Years feels like vintage Coben: tightly plotted, fast-paced and almost telegraphic in the sparseness of its prose - or perhaps it just seemed that way to someone who’d so recently suffered the florid excesses of Dan Brown’s Inferno. But I digress (though it did feel great to get the taste of bad Italian fare out of my mouth).
Whatever the case, Coben does a workmanlike job of building a plot and presenting his main character as a likable guy who just happens to have a slight obsession – OK, a major obsession. The author manages to tie everything together in a neat bow without any neck-breaker plot twists, though there’s need for an occasional doubling up on one’s willing suspension of disbelief. A few editing booboos and the occasional lapse in continuity might have bothered me more had I not been somnolent after the further adventures of Robert Langdon, but on the whole Six Years turned out to be a fine little read.
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