Three of Styles

Harlan Coben has become the king of the "random present-day encounter opens up deep dark past and connects to dangerous criminal event" thriller, but as Missing You shows, he would probably rule that roost even if it were a more common genre.

NYPD detective Katherine "Kat" Donovan was engaged once, but her fiancé left her and more or less vanished at about the same time her father, also an NYPD detective, was shot and killed. The one-two punch has left Kat functional, but largely disconnected from life. When a friend signs her up for a dating website, she peruses it after drinking a little too much and is surprised to find Jeff, her ex-fiancé, listed. She contacts him, but he seems strangely distant. Is he hiding something? Is he connected to the college student who's come to Kat for help in finding his missing mother, also a user of the same website? Kat works to find those answers as well as close out loose ends from her father's murder, but she may wind up learning things that she did not want to know. She might also learns things others don't want her to know, and they could take deadly steps to protect their secrets.

As always, Coben's storytelling skills are so good you don't realize how huge a set of coincidences you've swallowed until after you've finished. Kat and her friend Stacy are witty and make fun-to-read banter. Except in a few spots, the pace stays swift and the narrative doesn't meander. Like in several of his most recent books, it's the lead character's desire to come to terms with the painful past that leads them into the larger conspiracy or crime. The larger matter in Missing is a lot more plausible that some of the others he's spun, and he offers a more realistic trigger for all of these events that doesn't require the lead to be an idiot, a la Stay Close, or off-puttingly unlikeable, as in Caught. The resolution to the "at-home" issue is soapy and borderline silly, but it's working from the least interesting part of the story anyway.

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You cannot read, write or write about American West fiction without acknowledging the presence of its two towering names, Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour. The early-century Grey and mid-century L'Amour combined to define most of the genre's aspects for modern audiences, giving shape to what Western movies would later make onscreen essentials -- wide-open country, lone drifters, fast gunhands, life defined by a code of honor as much as the law, and so on.

But other names also hold their places of respect, like Elmer Kelton and Max Brand (Frederick Schiller Faust), or Matt Braun. Braun's 1976 Buck Colter is a textbook version of the classic Grey-L'Amour pattern, with young, green and tough cowhand Buck striking out with a few companions to make his mark in the wide, wild West. He and some partners want to try to stake out their own territory and run their own herd instead of spending all of their time working for the cattle barons of the Cimarron, but those barons aren't overly eager to carve another piece out of the pie, and they will be ruthless in stamping out competition. But in Buck, they find a man whose early tragic losses mean he doesn't scare easily and backs down even less easily. The confrontation is inevitable.

Braun has some quality work, but Buck Colter isn't likely to rank among it. The story and characters add nothing to the genre, and while many people who've read L'Amour say some of his books lack something, I would imagine few would define "something" as "clumsy sex talk/scenes and flatulence jokes."

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And speaking of Mr. L'Amour, although most of his catalogue is set in the American West, he wrote other historical fiction as well. His long saga of the Sackett family starts in 17th century England, for example. His 1984 novel The Walking Drum relates the story of Mathurin Kerbouchard, a Celt from the Brittany coast in the 12th century, who seeks revenge against the man who destroyed his home and killed his mother, and also travels to learn about the fate of his father, said to have been killed or captured while at sea.

Much of Drum is travelogue, as Mat moves from his homeland to Moorish Spain, and then eastward into modern-day Ukraine and Turkey. His keen eye and quest for knowledge find a home in Cordoba, but troubles there with one of the nobles -- a lady is involved -- push him away and put him back on his quest. L'Amour researched the era and offers plenty of detail about the cultures and societies through which Mat travels.

One of the things which prompted L'Amour to write the book, he says in an afterward, is that few North Americans know much of the history of the world outside of their own continent and Europe, and that historical fiction is one of the best teachers. He's right on both counts -- whether all of the information they pick up is accurate or not, there are a lot of people who know more about feudal Japan thanks to James Clavell's Shōgun or Victorian-era India because of M.M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions. And even if what they learn doesn't prompt them to find better and more in-depth research, they still know more than the people who pick up neither novel nor textbook.

But a lot of factors keep Drum from being that kind of novel for the 12th century. For one, it's too long and repetitious -- Mat gets in trouble, fights his way out, gets in more trouble, fights his way out, lucks into one quest resolution, etc., etc. For another, Mat himself is something of a jerk. He's casual and dismissive in his relationships with women, seeing them as pretty much fancies of the moment who are worth his time when he's around but not worth any kind of commitment. L'Amour lets one of the interchangeable series -- the Comtesse Suzanne -- get in her own verbal shots in the sparring, but in the end she's not even the last "love" Mat will have in the story. And finally, L'Amour drenches his narrative with the research he's done like a student writing a report who crams everything in to say, "See what I learned?" L'Amour said he enjoyed the 12th century and Mat so much that he planned to write two or three more novels about him, but never got the chance before his death in 1988. The end of L'Amour's story was a major loss for modern genre fiction, but the end of Mathurin Kerbouchard's was nowhere near as unwelcome.