On Patrol and At Home

The Shadow Patrol is the fifth novel by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson featuring semi-retired spy John Wells, the only American undercover agent to successfully penetrate Al Qaeda.

Wells is called in by his former boss, Vinny Duto, to make a trip to Afghanistan and visit the CIA offices there. Two years previously, a suicide bomber succeeded in a ruse that killed several agents and the station has never fully recovered. Duto also wants Wells to poke around the military base where the CIA works -- information has been leaking to terrorists and he needs to know who's doing it. Drug smuggling, double-dealing and rival mountain tribes will only complicate his mission.

Berenson's prose flows smoothly and lets his story unfold at a walk or a sprint as his plot requires. Wells is a canny pro who questions his own willingness to rely on violence in his job -- has he seen too much to live a normal life? Berenson also gave the spy a twist. During his undercover time, Wells actually converted to Islam and considers himself a Muslim today, which is something that makes some of his former fellow agents question his loyalties.

Patrol is a well-crafted spy novel, but Berenson has started to wear some of Well's character traits a little thin. The agent has found comfort in his religious life, but again we see him with the same doubts caused by his failure to maintain his prayer and study. The situation stays static. The plot he investigates its twisty enough, but the resolution happens sort of offscreen, leaving a feeling of incompleteness.

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There's a kind of laziness that implies a summer afternoon in a hammock, dozing while a baseball game plays on the radio. And there's a kind of laziness that implies someone who misses out on the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes because they don't want to get up from the couch when the prize patrol rings the doorbell. Stay Close, Harlan Coben's 17th novel, veers a lot closer to the latter than the former.

Suburban housewife Megan Pierce has a past that she's hidden from everyone: She used to strip at a "gentleman's club." Ray Levine used to be a prize-winning photojournalist, but a scarring incident from his past has left him taking pretend paparazzi photos at Bar Mitzvahs for really rich kids. And Detective Jack Broome has been looking for a missing man for 17 years. All of them find themselves intersecting when someone says they've seen the missing man -- Megan because she fears what might become known about her former life, Ray because the man can answer so many of the questions he still has from that night and Jack because solving this case might mean closure for a lot of hurting and wondering people.

Coben's almost made a career out of putting ordinary suburbanites in extraordinarily nasty situations. Either a chance encounter, a mistaken photo order, or a past indiscretion or something else bring darkness and violence to the world of the split-level ranch. In Stay Close, he seems unwilling to try to dream up a new way for this to happen and goes for the short cut of making Megan weapons-grade stupid -- the entire mess starts because she pays a visit to her old club. Ray's shattered life is similar to the protagonist of Coben's 2006 The Innocent, and the dogged determination and wrecked personal life of Broome is another Coben staple. And in the laziest of lazy movies, a couple of psychopathic mob enforcer/assassins have the quirk of -- hope you're sitting down -- being evangelical Christians. They discuss camp worship songs while staking out their prey.

Last year's Live Wire gave a little bit of oomph to Coben's mainstay Myron Bolitar series, and he began writing some young adult books featuring Myron's nephew Mickey. He's still got an engaging, funny authorial voice and a real yarn-spinner' s gift, and it's certainly possible there's a rebound in his future.

There are a couple of neat ideas in Stay Close about how broken people find ways to live fulfilling lives, but the book almost always puts those ideas into play from the narrator, rather than the characters themselves. In other words, it doesn't show, it tells, and that's deadly to reader interest. Those are some ideas worth considering, but since Coben doesn't seem to be much interested in them, neither am I.