My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“She said she was in danger, but that she’d be okay.”
So, I’m reading along and I notice, out of nowhere, that books are the only place I see people refer to being in danger. Movies, too.
https://giphy.com/embed/7NbNXY0hXaBWw
And in case there’s a blank space with a link in it, it’s supposed to an embedded gif of Whoopi Goldberg warning Demi Moore that she’s in danger. They don’t always work; WordPress pisses me off sometimes.
So anyway. In danger is an exalted place to be, like being in a state of grace, being in love, being in a family way. It’s special to be in danger. Being in danger leads to metamorphosis: From being in danger, you walk through fire and come out the other side forever changed. Or maybe it’s just a plot device; you go from being in danger to being dead and the end of your journey becomes the reason for the protagonist’s journey. Either way, being in danger is serious stuff.
But nobody says they’re in danger in real life. We say we’re up shit creek, or we’re in an evacuation area, or we’re waiting for the ax to fall, or if my ex doesn’t quit stalking me I’m buying a gun and capping his ass, but we never say we’re in danger. At least, I’ve never heard a real person say it.
But, back to the book. I was quite disappointed in the first Harlan Coben book I read, The Stranger (ha ha, that rhymes with danger, and now my head is going to be replaying yooou-oooh, stranger danger from that Cure song for the rest of the day, thank you very much), which I got accidentally because my fingers hit the wrong button on my touch screen when I was trying to check out the same title by Albert Camus. Coben’s effort under that title was unsatisfactory (although I liked the Camus book; both are reviewed here) but other reviewers said it was a poor effort from an author they usually like, so I gave him another chance.
All of which is my roundabout way of saying that Don’t Let Go was worth the read, so Coben redeems himself. I’m sure he was quite worried about it, too.
Bookshelves: mystery, detective, suspense, hot-off-the-press
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99 Monkeys 