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It's six years since Myron Bolitar last hit the streets as Harlan Coben's humorous hero and it's great to have him back in action in PROMISE ME. As popular as Coben's intervening thrillers may have been, for me Myron is tops. Myron was a star basketball player whose career was cruelly cut short. He then set himself up as a sports agent who had a habit of getting caught up in violent incidents in his clients' personal lives and sorting them out with his psychopathic WASP friend Win. Myron pretty much remained the wisecracking big softie, but when he found he was no longer caring about the bad guys that they killed along the way, he opted for a more conventional life. So what lures him back to his old ways? At a small party he is holding in his New Jersey home to introduce his new girlfriend, a 9/11 widow, to his other friends he overhears two teenage girls talking about being out on the town with some guys who were drink-driving. No stranger to the tragedies that ensue from such actions, Myron makes the girls promise him that if they ever find themselves in that situation or in any kind of trouble again they will call him and he'll come and get them, no questions asked. A few weeks later he gets a call from one of the girls, Aimee, who is stranded in New York. He drives her to an address as directed, and she disappears into the night, not to be heard from again. She's not the first 18-year-old to go missing from her school recently, so when the police initially mark Myron out as prime suspect there is another set of parents on his case, but by now Myron has promised to help find Aimee and he knows he has to move fast. Myron follows up the few leads he has, and soon it appears that the girls' lives were more complicated and perhaps traumatic than he realised. Meanwhile the parents of the missing girls and their friends shelter their kids from anything that might threaten their upcoming college places, and they aren't afraid to call in some vicious accomplices to help them find out the truth, or perhaps bury it. Fast and furious though the action is, Myron has time to grapple with what motivates him to get involved in these cases, and what impact it may have had on his relationships past and present. PROMISE ME is exactly what you would hope for from a Myron Bolitar novel, but it also includes many of the trademark elements of his standalone thrillers. The old crew of Win, Esmeralda, and Big Cyndi turn out, the humour is laugh out loud funny in places, the bad guys are disgustingly nasty, you care about the damaged people you meet, and the ending is as twisty as a reverse triple somersault with double rotation in the pike position. Delicious.
Reviewed by Bridget Bolton, May 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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