Just One Look

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I squirmed uncomfortably whenever he appeared, as indeed did his hapless victims -- a diabolical character, so horribly efficient and scary that the plot had to be good to keep a wimp like me reading. Maybe it was the characters; I was never too fond of Myron, and Coben’s books not featuring this character seemed to feature one that was just like him. Grace Lawson is living a happy, straightforward life in the suburbs with her husband, Jack, and two young children.

He still lives in New Jersey with his wife, Anne Armstrong-Coben MD, a pediatrician, and their four children. The story actually begins with a surprising admission from a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder. Harlan Coben is the modern master of the hook-and-twist - luring you in on the first page, only to shock you on the last ― Dan Brown. She finds an odd one in the pack: a mysterious picture from perhaps twenty years ago, showing four strangers she can't identify. Two books later, Bookspan, recognizing Coben’s broad international appeal, named NO SECOND CHANCE its first ever International Book of the Month in 2003 – the Main Selection in 15 different countries.The book remained engrossing throughout the conclusion, with a lot of secret revelations at the end. So Duncan has a picture of the entire group of five friends anonymously to Grace, she could show it to Jack.

This one did seem a bit more complex than other Coben books with all the characters to remember and the separate plotlines as well, but it still flowed pretty well. One of them looks like her husband Jack in the days before she met him on a beach in France, where she had gone to escape from her celebrity as a survivor of a mass tragedy. His previous books, including the "Myron Bolitar" series, have always had the heart-stopping plots, but there’s always been something just a tiny bit off about them.An ordinary snapshot causes a mother’s world to unravel in this shocking thriller from the bestselling author and creator of the hit Netflix drama The Stranger . Being a mother, Grace thought, was a lot like being an artist- you are always insecure, you always feel like a phony, you know that everybody else is better at it than you. Very few authors can keep you turning pages late into the night, desperate to know what happens to their characters and trying to unravel their plots. She and Eva both have sons who are friends at the same school – is there a connection between the disappearance of Eva’s family and the man across the street from Mylène?

However, Coben’s books have never been about the characters, they’ve been about the story—and this story is a doozy.

The plot is complex, dark, contains some real surprises, and has a twisty ending that I failed to spot. The mothers who doted obsessively on their offspring, the ones who performed their numbing tasks with that Stepford-ready smile and supernatural patience-you know, those mothers who always, always have the right supplies for the ideal after school craft. Her husband, Bastien (Thierry Neuvic) denies that it’s him – but the following day, having taken their three kids to a pop concert, he disappears.

Pair this with the same gripping plot and pages that seem to fly by, and Just One Look rates as Coben’s best book yet.Do yourself a favour – binge this one when it becomes available, as I suspect it will have you gripped. It is considered his sixth stand-alone novel, but does contain at least one reference to his Myron Bolitar series. Unfortunately, this book doesn’t do anything to break those clichés, and it just ends up just feeling more or less like the same thing as the rest of the Harlan Coben novel pile. Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. If this story proves one thing, is that it goes to show that secrets from the past will always, ALWAYS, catch up with you.