Book Review: WIN by Harlan Coben

A very good example of the kind of book you expect to find prominently displayed in airport bookstores

Add another tally mark to the “The Press Box sells books” column, because I marked this down as a book to check out after listening to last year’s episode where Bryan Curtis interviewed Harlan Coben. I was aware of Coben previously, but only as a name on books I would see when idly poking through airport bookstores. He was smart and funny on the pod (a shame he went to amherst, though…), so I made a note to check out something of his. When I stopped into our local indie bookstore to look for my own book on the shelf (see photo), I picked up a paper copy.

And, you know, that’s why you go on podcasts. Admittedly, the one extra sale to me is not having much marginal impact on Harlan Coben’s finances, but, you know, it’s the principle of the thing. And wayyyyy down the publishing food chain, it’s why I’ve spent much of the last three weeks talking into microphones in 10-30 minute segments…

This is Coben’s thirty-somethingth novel, a spin-off of sorts from his best-known series about sports agent Myron Bolitar. The main character and narrator of this is Bolitar’s friend and former landlord, Windsor Horne Lockwood III, who comes from an obnoxiously rich family, and sometimes uses his vast resources and martial-arts training to right wrongs through the strategic application of targeted violence and flipping great wodges of cash. As the book opens, he’s about to mete out some punishment to a bad guy, after which he is accosted by the FBI and brought to the scene of a murder in a ritzy NYC apartment. The authorities have found a Vermeer painting that was stolen from his family a couple decades earlier, and a suitace bearing his initials and family crest. This connects to darker crimes in his family’s past, so of course he spends the rest of the book working to uncover the truth, no matter what the cost. As one does.

I waffled a bit about whether to write this up or not, because “A very well-done example of the kind of book you expect to find prominently displayed in airport bookstores” is actually a perfectly adequate summary. The only other idea taking up much space in my brain was yet another post about the neverending arguments over Covid countermeasures, though, and just fucking shoot me.

Anyway, the decision to buy and read this was actually a moderately interesting one (to me, at least), in that for years and years I’ve thought of myself primarily as a reader of SF, in the broad “speculative fiction” sense. More and more, though, I’ve been finding myself having horrible reader’s block in that genre. The kinds of books that are currently generating critical buzz and discussion in the parts of fandom I still follow mostly hold very little appeal for me, and the new books that I do enjoy, nobody seems to talk about. So reading fiction has been a bit of a slog of late, leading me to shift a lot of my reading to non-fiction. Which, in turn, tends to be heavier than I’m up for at the end of a long day, so I’ve been spinning my wheels and playing Wordle clones rather than actually reading anything.

Thus, I’ve been thinking for a while that I might need to do a genre switch, a feeling that was accentuated by my latest in-genre read, the new Neal Stephenson novel Terminal Shock, which itself is basically a thriller. (I’m not quite done with it, but will write more when I finish it, probably next week.) So, I’ve picked up a couple of books by guys in bands I like (Devil House and Someone Should Pay for Your Pain), an acclaimed literary novel (When We Cease to Understand the World) and, well, this.

And, you know, it worked. I powered through this in just a couple of days. Having it on paper helped, because it’s not immediately connected to my doomscrolling apps (I actually started it because my phone battery was nearly exhausted), reducing the temptation to stop reading and look elsewhere. But mostly, it was just a fun read in the way that mystery/thriller books often are.

This is not going to be to all tastes, of course— Win is a super obnoxious rich guy, so making him the narrator is an interesting choice for 2021. (Having him be a Duke alumnus is a nice touch…) It’s also probably darker than the median mystery, with a lot of references to sex and violence and combinations thereof— though nothing is very explicit, so not too far off the median. There are a number of references to characters from the Bolitar series and presumably events from those books, but I didn’t feel like I was missing anything.

So, this is very much a “Fun read if you like this sort of thing” review. It does all the things I want from a book in this genre, and does them well. Twice in the last few days, I’ve gone upstairs intending to take a nap and spent an hour or so reading instead, which given how exhausting the last couple of weeks have been is maybe the highest praise I can offer. Other than “I also ordered the first few Bolitar books in paperback to take on vacation next week.”

So, you know, as I said at the top, The Press Box sells books. (Have me on the pod to talk about my book, you cowards…)

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And, yeah, that’s the end of another week. Here are some buttons:

And if you want to recommmend good books in this general vein, I’d be happy to have more to add to the queue (I’ve got some unread G.M. Ford lying around that I’ll probably dig out, but can always use new authors to look for…), so the comments will be open.