Good book!   I was up late and couldn’t finish another 4 hours so I slept but the minute I picked up again in the morning there it was –  he non-stop,  page-turning suspense Coben is known for.

Coben can be quite original in both his plots and writing. In this stand-alone he has the 1st person protagonist,  Napoleon (Nap) Dumas, a detective in a small New Jersey town,   investigating the deaths of three high school friends as well as the disappearance of his old girlfriend. Two of the deaths took place 15 years prior but the last one happened recently – a fellow cop.

*******
Don’t Let Go
by Harlan Coben
2017 / 368 pages
read by Steven Weber-  8h 42m
rating:  A+    / crime – suspense/procedural
*******

The book opens with the entrapment of someone who really doesn’t want that coming down and there are two murders. The set-up was a set-up.

One victim was the cop who was part of the entrapment,  a friend of Nap and, it turns out,  a part of a little club from high school days.

The other was a woman who worked with the cop on developing these set-ups but the twist is that  the  fingerprints of Nap”s old girlfriend, Maura, were found at the scene.    Leo and his girlfriend died due to a train wreck on the same night Maura disappeared.

What those murders turn up are memories of high school days and the friends who are either dead or missing.   As Nap follows his leads and does his own investigation, along with others who were around at the time a terrible scenario emerges.

An interesting and kind of literary twist is that Ned spends a lot of time talking to his twin brother,  Leo, who has been dead for 15 years.   It works.