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By Harlan Coben
Century

I can’t quite decide whether Harlan Coben occupies a place among crime fiction’s elite (Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly and so on) or the very good ones bubbling just beneath (Lee Child, Peter Robinson and so on). His success marries prolificacy (Home is his 30th novel), a reliable high standard, diversity (the inevitable Young Adult novel) and a long-running main series you can get lost in. Nevertheless, the very slickness that makes Coben so readable is also a kind of handicap: his work entertains but never quite sticks. Home stars his regular hero, Myron Bolitar, who marries the unlikely twin careers of sports agent and investigator. He is aided and often abetted by Windsor Horne Lockwood (the Third). Where Bolitar is smooth, amiable, attractive, Horne is cold, aristocratic, and ever so slightly inhuman. The case that drives Home threatens to reveal Lockwood’s more vulner­able sides. Ten years before, his nephew, Rhys, was kidnapped along with his friend, Patrick. When Patrick (or is it?) reappears in London, Bolitar winds up in the grim world of teenage prostitution. Adding light to the darkness is a subplot involving a hot wrestler named Esperanza Diaz, his own nephew, Mickey Bolitar, and a cross-dressing former Mossad agent named Zorra. Hijinks of a high order.