When dreams came true and reality died... (The Innocent - Harlan Coben)

Name: Delicate_Orchid1

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Product:	The Innocent - Harlan Coben
Date:	18/02/06 (501 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: brilliant writing - style, superb characters, thought - provoking

Disadvantages: a few confusing loopholes

How long do you have to pay for a simple mistake, and accident? Is it something that will haunt you your entire life? Or will there be a point in time when life will give you a break, tell you that you have suffered enough, let you move on with your life and be happy?

Matt Hunter was a young man with a promising future ahead of him. A quiet fellow, he never got into trouble. But one night, at a fraternity party, his friend spills a bit of beer on someone's windbreaker jacket . And this leads to a fight. As Matt is trying to do the right thing by asking the "fighters" to give his friend a break, he finds himself embroiled in a situation that spirals out of control. A grab to a neck, a fall, a crack of a skull on the pavement, a lifeless body. Next thing you know, Matt is brought into court on manslaughter charges and hauled off to jail for four years. For an accident, nothing more, nothing less. And he sure pays for it in jail - being beaten to a pulp time and time again.

Now that he is out of jail, things seem to have turned for the better. He works as a paralegal at a prestigious law firm in Newark. He's good at what he does, essentially doing all the legal work behind the scenes that the partners then take credit for. And he's got a beautiful wife, Olivia, who just discovered that she is pregnant. Sure, he still gets suspicious looks and people don't always want him around. But life is looking up for Matt. Or is it? Suddenly his wife is on a business trip - and it transpires that he has no clue where she is. And then someone seems to be following him, harassing him - threatening his new-found life and happiness. Is his world going to spiral out of control once again? Or will he solve the mystery and finally be able to put the past behind him?

I simply loved this story from the moment I started it. Coben starts his book with a prologue, introducing the reader to Matt Hunter by telling his story as if he was addressing Matt directly. This superb writing style draws the reader straight into the story, evoking feelings of sympathy, pity and devastation - and a general feeling of the unfairness of life. By the same token, Coben uses this style again in an epilogue to the story. The main part of the story is written in third person and takes place nine years after the events accounted for in the brilliantly written prologue.

Coben's characters, whether minor or major, all come across as people one might meet in real life. None of them is perfect, they all have a history - and Coben ensures that this history is brought out little by little, much like a person's history might be brought out once you get to know them better and better by chatting to them and spending more time with them. Most of the flaws he brings out in the main characters are of the type that would make you back off from such people in real life, perhaps even mistrust them to an irreversible extent, which in fact many of the other characters in the plot do. As a neutral third party, however, the flaws make the characters simply more endearing.

The characters make the read more than another crime thriller; they make it a thought-provoking piece of writing. As a reader, it made me question my own judgment of people, which sometimes might be too hasty. It made me ask myself whether the cliché, that "a leopard never changes its spots", is in fact true. It made me think about second chances and new starts in a way that I have never thought about before.

All this "deepness" of Coben's writing does not detract from the fact that the storyline is simply addictive. I could not stop reading this book - and it upset me whenever I had to put it down. There is a lot going on in the plot, and there are more twists in here than in a curly fry. It simply keeps you hooked. However, the unexpected twists do annoy from time to time, because on occasion I felt like there was a loophole, an error in the plot, an unexplained issue that just did not add up. Coming across these little hick-ups was much like waving away an annoying fly - a few pages after noticing them, I simply forgot about them. And in fact, some of the unexplained issues where simply reserved for explanation at another stage. My slight fear is, however, that these holes in the plot may lose a couple of readers along the way, as it is simply difficult to keep up.

I also felt that there were a few too many characters in the plot. Being someone who has issues remembering names, I sometimes got lost as to who was actually being discussed at the time. I did not lose the hang of the plot, but it slightly annoyed me to have to think back and search my memory for details I had previously read over as unimportant.

The Daily Telegraph commented that this is "a book to read in one gulp", and I would fully agree with this comment. I personally started reading this book on the way to work - and instantly regretted not to have kept the book until I had a day off to read it in one sitting. I strongly recommend taking this along on vacation - especially if you have a long-haul flight ahead of you. I am sure you'll arrive at your destination in no time with this excellent piece of distraction. No doubt, this is one of the most entertaining and gripping books I have read in a long time.


***Further information***

Orion Books
Price: £6.99 for a new paperback
Pages: 439

Summary: A brilliant book to be read in one gulp.