Suspense! And, Suspense?

Nobody reads suspense thrillers looking for great literature -- at least, they don't more than once. All the same, thriller writers, like Serious Authors, possess differing skill levels. Stephen Coonts is one who commands quite a bit of skill at shaping his stories and making them flow smoothly whether they're building suspense or hurtling through action sequences. His 1990 Jake Grafton book Under Siege is a good example. The arrest of a Columbian drug lord during the George H.W. Bush administration provides the hook for a story linking narco-terrorism, undecover police operatives, crack-dealing gangs, assassination attempts and quite a lot of other threads together. This is early in the series, so Coonts is still laying out the characterizations of his players, but he does so deftly enough that they stand out from the cookie-cutter crowd that peoples most novels of this kind. And Coonts' vision of how the government would respond to armed terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C. is interesting and not a little bit chilling considering he's writing around a decade before 9/11. Two things weaken Under Siege in relationship to some of Coonts' later work. One, he creates events that make his fictional world diverge widely from the real world we live in, and political suspense thrillers work best when the characters inhabit a world as close to our own as the author can manage. The split doesn't hurt Under Siege so much as it will hamper stories that follow it. Two, Coonts seems so consumed with the desire to Say Something about U.S. drug policy and drug culture that he hangs an albatross of an ending on one of his plot threads that simply can't be believed. Overall, though, Under Siege is a quality read and worth the time.

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Harlen Coben has a gift for telling stories that engage readers so well that it's not until they put the book down and think about it later that they realize just how preposterous some of the plotting was. Of late, he's been laying on the preposterousness (preposterity?) to greater and greater degrees; Long Lost should have been a welcome return to his mainstay character, Myron Bolitar, but was instead an utterly ridiculous story about sleeper jihadists and controlled breeding. Caught rolls that back some, but has some other problems that keep it from fully succeeding. Wendy Tynes is a television reporter who stalks pedophiles in teen chat rooms and sets up ambush interviews with them, a la NBC's To Catch a Predator show. When she snares Dan Mercer with one of her stings, things begin to go wrong quickly. Mercer may be innocent. But he may also be connected with the disappearance of a high school student. The truth about Mercer and about the student's disappearing will probably surprise readers, mostly because Coben pulls it out of thin air with a whiplash-inducing set of final sequences. As always for Coben, family issues and family relationships color much of the novel, and he also spends some time exploring matters related to forgiveness. His storytelling skill keeps the wild mood swings of the plot from slowing us down, but the biggest flaw is probably how unsympathetic a character Wendy Tynes turns out to be. We don't like her when we first meet her as a kind of ambush predator herself, sticking a camera and microphone in Dan Mercer's face when we already know she's at least partly wrong about him. She improves over the course of the novel, but when she ends asking for forgiveness she was just pages earlier unwilling to grant, she loses most of that goodwill.  In Caught, Coben continues to hamstring his storytelling gifts and interesting ideas by stuffing them into silly plotlines, creating books that give the impression of a Three Stooges short starring Laurence Olivier and Katherine Hepburn. All of those things are just fine by themselves, but they don't mix well in the end.