Military Bookshelf: Spring into Mystery
Military.com - Tom Miller
Apr 14, 2008
"Hold Tight", by Harlan Coben.
Dutton, $26.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-525-95060-8
Coben is a favorite of readers and critics alike. The author of fourteen mystery novels, including seven featuring sports-agent sleuth Myron Bolitar, Coben has won numerous literary awards and appeared frequently on the best-seller list. Critics have called him "the reigning master of clockwork suspense" and "the maestro of mystery" and compared him to Hitchcock.
Heady stuff and hard to live up to, but Coben is up to the task in Hold Tight, his latest page turner.
There are more threads here than a quilting bee. Two women, Marianne Gillespie and Reba Cordova, are snatched in suburban New Jersey and viciously beaten to death by a former mercenary named Nash.
Meanwhile, Mike and Tia Baye, a physician and lawyer respectively, are worried about their 16-year-old son Adam who's become withdrawn and rebellious since the suicide of his friend Spencer Hill.
And, then, there's 11-year-old-daughter Jill's best friend Yasmin Novak and her father Guy. After Jill and Yasmin's teacher, Joe Lewison, makes a thoughtless remark about Yasmin's facial hair, Yasmin becomes the butt of jokes at school. Guy is furious and wants Lewison to suffer too. Lewison is distraught and worried about what Guy Novak is capable of.
While the cops try to solve the gruesome murders, Adam Baye disappears. His parents are sure that he's in danger and set out to track him down. When Mike traces Adam to a youth club in the Bronx, he's jumped and beaten unconscious. Returning to the scene later, he's picked up by the FBI.
Confused? Yeah, I was too. But, Coben is a "master" and a "maestro" and knows how to keep readers guessing and turning pages. He also knows how to stitch all those seemingly disparate threads into a seamless fabric just in time for a surprising climax.
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"Separated at Death", by Sheldon Rusch.
Berkley Prime Crime, $23.95 (310p) ISBN 978-0-451-21948-5
Usually when two people lose their heads, they get married. Here, they lose their heads because they're getting divorced.
In advertising exec Rusch's third novel (after For Edgar and The Boy with Perfect Hands), his heroine, Illinois State Police Special Agent Elizabeth Hewitt, has to contend with a serial killer who targets estranged couples. If that's not strange enough, the victims are decapitated and the heads are taken. Then, the killer photographs the heads and Photoshops them onto a wedding picture and mails the re-touched photo to a suburban weekly.
There's no shortage of suspects including: Dr. Gerry Boccachio, a psychologist who not only counseled but also is linked sexually to some of the victims; and Byron Biffle whose paper receives the photos and whose father, a famous crime reporter, died while investigating a murder that might be related to the current case.
Complicating matters for Hewitt, Jen Spangler, the daughter of her boss and a criminal justice major who's job-shadowing her, goes missing. It's up to Hewitt and her fiancé, police detective Brady Richter, to unravel the puzzle and rescue Spangler before her head rolls too.
Atmospheric and suspenseful, Separated at Death keeps the reader turning pages and guessing until the climax. It's only then, when the author unravels the many threads of the plot, that readers are likely to be disappointed by the improbability of much of it.
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Copyright 2008 by Tom Miller
A former history professor, Tom Miller is a novelist and essayist. His most recent novel, Freshman Sensation (2007), is available from the publisher at http://www.ccjournal.com/. His reviews and essays have appeared in numerous books, journals, and newspapers, including The Encyclopedia of Southern History, American History Illustrated, the Chicago Tribune, and the Des Moines Register. He also is a former Army Officer and Vietnam Veteran.
