The Final Detail by Harlan Coben (Myron Bolitar #6)

The Final Detail by Harlan Coben

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



 Jacket Blurb: Myron is settled in a Caribbean idyll - but all is not as well as you could rightfully expect. Myron is hiding from his own failures and friends. But then, he is forced back to face his old life, as his dearest friend is charged with murder. And the victim is one of his oldest clients.

Ironically, I just finished a Michael Coben book (Trunk Music #6) where Harry Bosch tells his team that when they solve the mystery, it will be in the details, the details that they were looking at all along, right on the front of the report. 

For The Final Detail by Coben, it was indeed in the details, but in this particular book the reader  doesn't get to see them ahead of time.  Instead, the reader is told piecemeal, usually after Myron figures out what was happening and goes to The Big Confrontation.  I'm not sure I like this method of storytelling, because then I don't have enough of the information to try and figure out the mystery for myself.

The Final Detail was perhaps less about the mystery than Myron coping with morality and the ramification of his actions.  In the last book he left the love of his life - Jessica - after realizing that maybe she wasn't the love of his life after all, he still feels responsible for the death of the woman who came between him and Jessica. Myron ran away from his friends, family, and business, and that's what took a hit in a bad, bad way.  Esperanza is being framed for the murder of his first client, the rest of MB Sportsrep clients are leaving in droves to the competition, and his father had a heart attack.  Ironically, it was this last that hit Myron the hardest.

So, what we have is a mystery about the frailty of ourselves and the ramifications of our actions.  Myron comes up with a metaphor that life is all about the foul line - we want to think we stay inside that line, but that line isn't always clearly defined. 

I enjoyed this book, I found myself sitting in the garage and my parking pace at work trying to squeeze in "just five more minutes", but it's not your standard mystery.



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