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JUST ONE LOOK
by Harlan Coben
Orion, April 2004
352 pages
12.99GBP
ISBN: 0752852582


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Grace Lawson, a happily married mother of two in New Jersey, picks up some photographs from the developers one day and finds an old photo of five young people has been added. 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. After just one look at the photo, Jack disappears, taking it with him.

Receiving a message that he is trouble, Grace searches for him with the police, and some unsavoury acquaintances, but she has to delve into his enigmatic past to find any leads.

Meanwhile Scott Duncan, is on leave from the US attorney's office and investigating the murder of his sister Geri in a house fire, which until recently everyone had thought to be accidental. And nearby a brutal killer is meting out slow and tortuous deaths to a seemingly unrelated group of people. So many dramatic occurrences in one quiet town have to be linked, but how?

Whilst the main characters of Grace and Scott kept me turning the pages without perhaps engaging my emotions too much, there were some wonderful minor characters. Charlaine Swain, a bored housewife brightening her life with tawdry exhibitionism, but who acts with great sense and bravery when her life is caught up with the killer, Eric Wu, particularly moved me.

Mr Wu moved me in quite a different way: a vicious killer trained in the prisons of his native Korea to disable people with his bare hands using surgical precision. 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. (I have since discovered that Eric Wu also appears in Harlan Coben's earlier novel, TELL NO ONE, but JUST ONE LOOK stands on its own, and I didn't feel I was missing any back-story).

I am a big fan of Harlan Coben's Myron Bolitar series, and was a little wary of trying one of his standalones, but I'm glad I did. Whilst this lacks the wonderful humour of the series, it is truly a riveting read, and in the tradition of all good thrillers, very hard to put down. The plot is complex, dark, contains some real surprises, and has a twisty ending that I failed to spot. Recommended.

Reviewed by Bridget Bolton, April 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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