Live Wire
Myron Bolitar Series, No 10
Harlan Coben

Dutton
March 22, 2011/ ISBN 0525952063
Private Investigator / New York / Contemporary
Amazon

Reviewed by L J Roberts

First Sentence: The ugliest truth, a friend once told Myron, is still better than the prettiest of lies.

Sports and celebrity representative Myron Bolitar’s life has undergone changes. His business, MB Reps, now handles more than sports figures. A very pregnant ex-tennis-star client asks Myron to find her musician husband who left her after he sees a Facebook post saying “Not His.” The search leads Myron and his team into a search for missing members of Myron’s family and into the world of drugs and murder.

It has been awhile since the last Myron Bolitar book and I’d forgotten how enjoyable is Coben’s dry humor and the wonderfully colorful characters of Myron, his parents, former wrestler partners Big Cindy and Esparanza, and yes, even Win, a psychopath-with-a-code.

What is also nice is that Coben doesn’t assume readers have been following the series.

Perhaps because most of the secondary characters are less then empathic, they seem flat and stereotypical by comparison. At the same time, even for those characters which are unpleasant, Coben creates a sense of sympathy for most of them. While that sounds contradictory, it works.

Coben knows how to write; there are wonderful sentences and passages that made mestop and consider. Myron’s father’s observation about parenting was one such passage.There are layers to the story and observations about perception, truth, lies and families.

There are stories behind stories that are remarkably impactful in spite of the book’s violence, yet even the scenes of violence are written with precision.
“Live Wire” is brutal, tragic and filled with twists that are very well executed.
At the same time, it effectively touches one’s emotions as it deals with Myron’s family and past as well as its future. It is very much a transitional book for the characters and I’m both apprehensive and intrigued to see where the series goes from here.