Just One Look

Just One Look is not the roller coaster ride of Coben's other books; Tell No One, Gone For Good, and No Second Chance. This book is more a trip on a slightly rolling sea....until the last few pages when you are hit by a giant wave you didn't see coming. Pure Harlan Coben.I agree with other reviewers that this latest adventure is not as outstanding as Coben's others. Let us not forget, though, that a good Coben novel is better than 90% of other authors' great novels.As I'm sure you know by now, this is a story of a happy, successful couple with two children who are blindsided by someone placing a 15 year old picture in with recently developed family snapshots. The husband disappears, the wife searches for him, and a myriad of characters pop out of the pages from the past of both husband and wife. Both of whom have a serious past.Oddly, for 2 people who have been married for years, these two know basically nothing about each other's lives before they met. That takes a bit of a leap of faith. Another criticism is that I really wasn't invested in the two main characters. Coben failed to develop them to the point where I particularly cared what happened to them. This is not to say that I didn't want to know how it all would end, because I did, and read this in one day. Unlike Coben's past 3 novels, however, I was able to put it down for minutes at a time and go about my day.Yes, some of the characters are stereotypes and the one I came to care about most was a pure Coben twist character - a woman who is in the right place at all of the wrong times and, in my opinion, was the true heroine of a story which didn't contain many, if any, heroic folk.This is a story of how youthful indescretions can wreak havoc and come back to haunt you many years later with the help of a few flawed personalities. It is definitely a must read, a good story, and an ending that made me want to go back and reread the whole story to see why I didn't see that big wave coming.

Harlan Coben's new book "Just One Look", like his earlier work, is hard to put down. His style is compelling and his heroine, in this story, could be you, watching and wondering as the comfortable life you inow and love disappears in an instant.The tangle of characters in "Just One Look" starts with husband and wife, Jack and Grace Lawson. Grace is semi-famous as the survivor of a tragic stampede at a rock concert, where 18 people were killed when an out of control crowd tried to escape gunshots. The tragedy is known as "The Boston Massacre" and Grace still limps due to her injuries in the melee.The Massacre haunts the parents and loved ones of those who died and Grace knows that the disappearance of her husband one night is somehow connected with her past. She can't help but feel responsible for Jack being missing, since she showed him an old photograph of 5 people; the picture mysteriously appeared in the most recent package of photos she had processed at the local Photomat.Jack's in the photo, but Grace doesn't know the identity of the others...Coben follows her efforts to find the truth about the picture, and to find Jack. Over time, she learns that the others have been tainted by tragedy, have disappeared, or have lost their own lives. In trying to solve the mystery, Grace enlists a mob connection, Carl Vespa, whose son died in the Massacre, local police and attorneys who are all somehow connected to the photograph. Serial-killer-for-hire Eric Wu (who appeared in Coben's "Tell No One") is the key to deaths and disappearances. Grace is able to follow the thread, while trying to keep her small children safe.Although I was taken with the tension and the mystery of the plot, I was sorely disappointed at the overall quality of the book. Coben seems caught, in his last four works, with a tangle of spouses with mysterious pasts and present disappearances. Although I could not guess the outcomes of this particular thriller, (they remain vague and unsettling, then tumble out of the final chapter) neither was I very interested in the motivations of the characters or the secrets from the past.Coben needs to incorporate his tension-filled style with a new and more unique plotline in order to keep the audience he's built since he stopped writing his "humor-thriller" series about sports agent Myron Bolitar. In "Just One Look" he gives us great pacing, but then dumps the outcomes one after another in the final chapter. There's not enough new here to be wildly enthusiastic, but I'm not ready to give up on Coben just yet. Still, "Just One Look" could have been titled, "Same Old, Same Old".

Absolutely great story! Terrible Female narrator; Angela Dawe made my wife and I cringe; no idea why she thought that voice she used made for a good narration.

I am always amazed that HC can find ways to send the reader down one road or another until a dramatic finish to the story

This novel was a gripping mystery full of twists and turns that captivated my attention and didn't disappoint in the end.