Quick Book Reviews Blog

Harlan Coben's Take on Hope Hope is a rather funny concept, for on one hand it can give us the will to live, to continue fighting and enduring, while on the other hand, it can deceptively lead us from the frying pan into the fire as it becomes an obsession and an inability to accept reality. Luckily for us though, literary characters are fortunate enough not having to contend with such frustrating real-life dilemmas. For them, hope is without a question the path (and literary device) to follow and cling to, as Win Lockwood does for over a decade in Harlan Coben's Home .

When we are presented with evil characters in literature that have clear, practical motivations, no matter how ridiculous they may be, there is a certain sense of comfort; after all, it means they could perhaps be bargained with, reasoned with, and broken down. The truly terrifying villains, perhaps both inside and outside of a book, are the ones who seem to not only be morally-bankrupt, but causing evil for the mere sake of perpetuating it.

Few are those who would claim that the countless technological advancements we come up with don't have their extraordinary benefits. Why, only in the past few decades we've developed a highly-efficient and unprecedentedly vast global network capable of connecting anyone with everyone else in real time. This network, which we all know as the Internet and deeply venerate, has of course opened up the opportunity for good as well as evil, and as it happens Harlan Coben explored that idea in his latest novel, Missing You .

Six Years by Harlan Coben is a sort of mystery story, one that is a level above the rest in my opinion. It starts off with the introduction of our great hero, Jake Fisher. Six years ago, his wife left him to marry another, and he coped with it by investing himself in his career. For all this time he has promised to leave Natalie alone, but on a faithful day, he sees the obituary of the man she left Jake for. Unable to contain himself, Jake goes on to attend his funeral, but while there, something strange happens: he sees the man’s wife, but she is not Natalie.