Gone for good /

Coben, best known for his popular series of seven mysteries starring Harvard-educated sports agent/private eye Myron Bolitar, branched out from Renaissance man Bolitar to a quite ordinary hero in Tell No One [BKL My 1 01]. He returns with another stand-alone thriller exploring what happens when fate taps an ordinary guy on the shoulder, forcing him to turn detective. The hero, Will Klein, the director of a New York City foundation for runaway teenagers, has lived for 11 years with the knowledge of a runaway in his own family. His older brother is "gone for good" (family shorthand for dead), after the brutal slaying of their neighbor's daughter. Even with all the evidence pointing to the older brother, the family cannot accept that their golden boy, a handsome, brilliant tennis champ, committed the murder. Propelling the action here is Will's discovery, just after his mother's funeral, of a photograph that proves his brother is still alive. Just as he's absorbing this shocking fact, Klein's girlfriend disappears after police charge her with murder. Coben delivers far more than an absorbing mystery here. Through Klein, the psychological suspense turns on the question of guilt, surely, but also on the transcendence of familial love and forgiveness. Watching Klein decide among dangerous alternatives, as the clockwork plot keeps picking up speed, is breathtaking. --Connie Fletcher

"We never forget our first love. Mine ended up being murdered." Newcomers and fans alike will know they're deep in Coben country with the author's ninth book, in which a counselor of runaways with his own history of broken hearts and death finds himself caught in a web of lost identities, forgotten nemeses and smoldering grudges. Will Klein was a nice Jewish boy from a nice Jersey suburb until his ex-girlfriend was found strangled next door and his brother became an international fugitive. Eleven years later, as his mother succumbs to cancer, Will gets the deathbed confession that his brother, Ken, is alive; around the same time, his girlfriend, Sheila (herself a runaway with a "murky past"), disappears and a neighborhood psycho called the Ghost resurfaces. Will is yanked into an FBI investigation via his friend Squares (a yogi whose forehead tattoo carries multiple meanings), which jumbles up the aforementioned cast of characters with another mystery occurring in the Midwest. True to form, Coben keeps the plot twists coming fast and furious, and readers will give up trying to guess the outcome quite early on; yet the book's entertainment value lies less in its plot than its characters. From the New York streetwalker Raquel ("Many transvestites are beautiful. Raquel was not. He was black, six-six, and comfortably on the north side of three hundred pounds") to Belmont, Neb.'s Sheriff Bertha Farrow ("Murder scenes were bad, but for overall vomit-inducing, bone-crunching, head-splitting, blood-splattering grossness, it was hard to beat the metal-against-flesh effect of an old-fashioned automobile accident"), this title delivers. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Coben has written another winner, guaranteed to keep readers awake all night. On the day of his mother's funeral, Will Klein discovers a photograph proving that his brother, Ken, is alive. Eleven years earlier, a young woman who was dating Ken was found strangled, and Ken's blood was found at the murder scene. Will never heard from Ken after that night, and his family and the police assumed that he was dead. While Will is contemplating this stunning revelation, his girlfriend, Sheila, vanishes under mysterious circumstances. Will's efforts to solve the disappearances of Sheila and Ken open a terrifying Pandora's box. Complex and unpredictable, this is even better than Coben's last novel, Tell No One. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/02.] Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A betwixt-and-between thriller from the talented chronicler of sports agent Myron Bolitar (Darkest Fear, 2000, etc.). Eleven years after his brother Ken vanished after being accused of raping and strangling neighborhood girl Julie Miller, Will Klein's dying mother tells him that Ken's still alive. Then, several hours after her funeral, Will suffers an even more devastating loss when his lover Sheila Rogers, a volunteer at Covenant House, the New York shelter for street kids Will runs, disappears as well. And there's even worse news: Joseph Pistillo, the FBI's top man in New York, is not only still looking for Ken, whom he turns out to have a damningly personal reason for wanting to find; he suspects Sheila, who never told Will anything about her turbulent past except that she'd run away from home, was up to no good as well. With the help of Julie's kid sister Katy and his omnicompetent sidekick Squares, an ex-Nazi turned franchise fitness guru, Will goes in search of the truth about Ken and Sheila, ignoring Pistillo's threats of legal action and the even more dire threats of Ken's murderously well-connected school buddies John Asselta, the Ghost (ex-wrestler), and Philip McGuane (ex-student council president) in an attempt to stand on his own two feet after years of hiding behind his big brother's strength. Will's newfound courage comes too late to help Sheila, who's already been killed and dumped at the side of a Nebraska road. But will it save Ken, or Katy, or Will himself? Coben dispenses crucial plot twists with an eyedropper, expertly wringing the maximum suspense out of each jaw-dropping surprise. After a while, though, the high-energy revelations begin to sprawl, and this synthetic, highly enjoyable tale ends up stuck between grim realism and the sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy in which nobody, not even the dead, is ever gone for good.