- Win, by Harlan Coben. Penguin, $32.99.
People just love a good sociopath, according to author Harlan Coben.
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That is to say, they love a fictional sociopath. Think, for example, of serial killer Dexter Morgan, cannibal Dr Hannibal Lector - and Coben's own creation, Windsor Horne Lockwood III. Win, as he's known, has been the superwealthy, superhedonistic and superdangerous sidekick to former NBA player/sports agent/private investigator Myron Bolitar in a series of novels. He's fiercely loyal to Myron and will often undertake tasks his friend can't or won't bring himself to do, up to and including murder.
Now, the sidekick becomes the central figure - and narrates his own story - in Coben's latest novel, Win.
"He's probably my most popular character," Coben - who's sold more than 70 million books and is the first mystery writer to win three of the major genre awards - the Edgar, Shamus and Anthony Awards - says. Win might be the start of a new book series.
In Win, the FBI contact our anti-hero when a recluse living in the Upper West Side of New York is found murdered in his penthouse apartment. Also found there are two unusual objects: a stolen Vermeer painting and a leather suitcase with the initials WHL3.
These items were stolen more than 20 years ago during a robbery of the Lockwood family estate, when Win's cousin, Patricia Lockwood, was kidnapped and locked in an isolated cabin. Patricia escaped after a few months but the man who abducted her was, it seems, was involved in radical politics and also behind an act of domestic terrorism.
He might still be at large.
Win's interest is piqued, and he has the means and the motive to investigate. And he is willing and able to do things the government can't - or at least shouldn't - to achieve his ends.
While the public's fascination with violent sociopaths continues - perhaps people get vicarious thrills from thoughts and deeds they dare not entertain themselves - nobody wants to live next door to one, much less share a home with one or encounter one.
But in Coben's universe, these are distinctly possible. And if not a violent sociopath, someone who, at the very least, can make your life very different and very difficult, turning your world upside down.
Coben's "standalone" thrillers take place in the same universe as the Bolitar books (there are crossover characters) but rather than the heroics of that series, the standalones tend to focus on ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. A Coben story has lots of twists and turns in the plot and plenty of mystery, danger and suspense, along with flashes of humour, all of which have contributed to his huge success.
I have my wife, four kids, I'm married and in the 'burbs - that's Myron's dream. He has my dream: my parents died when I was young but he still gets to enjoy his parents and their relationship
He calls them "novels of the immersion", so full of emotion and action a reader is drawn into the world of the story and compelled to keep reading to find out what happens.
Coben starts with an idea that he works on and if it takes hold, develops into a book. Whether it's a standalone story or part of the Myron/Win series depends on the best point of view from which to tell the story.
Among the ideas that have come to fruition are: what if a kid suddenly appears at the age of six and nobody knows where he came from or who his parents are (The Boy from the Woods) and why does a man receive a message on his computer containing a phrase only he and his dead wife know - eight years after she was murdered (Tell No One).
The classic American private investigator in fiction tended to be a lone wolf, like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone (two acknowledged Coben inspirations: Ed McBain and Robert B. Parker are others) - but in more recent decades we've seen a common dyad of wisecracking hero and dangerous, loyal offsider: Parker had Spenser and Hawk and Robert Crais has Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. Coben's Bolitar/Win novels are in this line.
He says the two different but complementary men play off each other and work well together.
During the series neither formed intimate relationships with women - Myron not always for lack of trying, Win because he's not interested, being quite happy to pay for his sexual pleasures - though by now this might be changing and one of them has fathered a daughter.
Coben, 59, says Win is based - loosely - on his roommate at Amherst College. The author resembles Myron in some ways: both are Jewish, both are from New Jersey, both were college basketball players though on that last point Myron was better: "He was faster, stronger, funnier, smarter."
A serious injury put Myron out of the professional athletic world, leading to his agent and PI work.
While there might an element of wish fulfilment for Coben in his character, it goes both ways, each having something for which the other longs.
"I was wiser in the ways of women," Coben says. He's been with his wife, paedatrician and academic Anne Armstrong-Cohen, since 1982, and they married in 1988.
"I have my wife, four kids, I'm married and in the 'burbs - that's Myron's dream. He has my dream: my parents died when I was young but he still gets to enjoy his parents and their relationship."
As a young man, he worked in his family's travel business but wanted to be a writer.
"My father gave me a copy of Marathon Man by William Goldman," he says. The book - adapted into a 1976 film - was a thriller in which Szell, a former SS dentist came to New York from South America to take possession of stolen diamonds. He came up against a Jewish graduate student, Babe, who has something personal to avenge. I couldn't put it down and I thought, 'How cool to do this for a living.'"
And, since Play Dead - about a widowed model whose basketballer husband might be alive - was published in 1990, that's just what he's been doing, with more than 30 books so far.
While the Myron and Win stories remain on the page for now, in more recent years some of his books have been adapted to screens large and small in Europe and the US. Coben has been involved in them on various levels, taking a particularly hands-on approach as an executive producer on the English-language productions for Netflix with which he has a multiyear, multimillion deal for adaptations of The Innocent, Gone for Good and Stay Close, among others. Juggling the books and adaptations is not a problem, he says. Apart from work and his family, he doesn't have many big interests.
"I don't collect anything," he says. Except, it seems, fans.