Review: Coben's 'Second Chance' powerful
By L.D. Meagher
CNN
"No Second Chance"
By Harlan Coben
Dutton
Fiction
352 pages
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Story Tools
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(CNN) -- Say you're a doctor, a plastic surgeon to be precise, married to the beautiful daughter of the richest man in town, father of a precious six-month-old daughter.
What's the worst thing that can happen to you? Getting shot in the chest? Finding out your wife is dead? Learning that your daughter has been kidnapped?
For Dr. Mac Seidman, it's all three. And that's just the beginning of "No Second Chance," the latest novel by Harlan Coben. Over the course of this taut thriller, Marc will discover that time does not heal all wounds. Especially not when someone returns to run a rusty razor blade over the scab.
Coben, an award-winning mystery writer, has crafted a superb suspense yarn out of seemingly mundane details. It's set in the suburbs, those supposed havens from violence and urban rot. Marc Seidman has not led a sheltered life. His practice is repairing the ravages of war and disease on children from impoverished countries.
But the New Jersey 'burbs are his home turf. It never enters his mind that his wife, his daughter, or his life might be in danger within the walls of their own home.
Action building
The author, creator of the Myron Bolitar mystery series, knows how to wring the most out of every word he writes. His narrative shifts seamlessly from Marc's first-person point of view to third-person exposition focusing on other characters, no mean technical feat. Coben keeps the action building -- another nice trick since the story spans eighteen months. He has a canny eye for detail.
"His head was too big for his shoulders," Coben writes of a detective on the case, "so that you feared his neck would collapse from the weight of it. His hair was crew cut all around, except in the front, where it hung down in a Caesar line above his eyes. A soul patch, an ugly smear of growth, sat on his chin like a burrowing insect. All in all, he looked like a member of a boy band gone to serious seed."
As vicious as the assault on Marc's family is, it pales in comparison to what comes later. And as he tries to find his missing daughter, Marc's faith in the verities of his everyday life -- family ties and the loyalty of friends -- is left in tatters. Even the love of his life may not be the person he believes her to be.
"No Second Chance" fires on all cylinders. Tightly plotted, with smart characterizations and themes that strike universal chords, it's a story that impels the reader forward as fast as the pages will turn. Coben, who moved beyond genre fiction in his previous two novels, now can claim the territory of the suspense thriller as his own.
