Month: June 2022

Harlan Coben is a legend among thriller writers, penning 31 books by now, starting with his wonderful Myron Bolitar series and lately triumphing with one-offs that have spawned five successful Netflix series. He is a polished writer in the school of “less is more,” with an entertaining turn in sardonic dialogue, and his plotting is nonpareil. All those strengths are on full display in “The Match“. It is the second book to feature Wilde, “the boy from the woods,” an accomplished ex-soldier who prefers to reside in the wilderness. In this outing, Wilde follows up leads toward his unknown parents, at the same time as an altruistic hacker group targeting vicious trolls attracts a serial killer. The Match is a rocket of a read, and in time-honored fashion, the author provides plot twist upon plot twist until a denouement that wraps up all the loose ends. So, yes, a fun read, but this reader parsed the final para and looked back on the careening plot and wondered, “what was the point?” Marrying DNA, social media trolling, hacking, and a cast revolving around unknowable Wilde … all these plot elements served to mystify but never cohered with any overarching logic. The characters disappeared into a warm bath of baffling turns of logic. Reader, I was disappointed, but I turned the pages.

“Once There Were Wolves” follows hot on the heels of Charlotte McConaghy’s lyrical, propulsive Migrations (my review here) and has a similar mix of dramatic plot, conservation backdrop, and natural world depiction. The hero is Inti Flynn, part of a team of visionaries reintroducing over a dozen wolves into remote Scottish wilderness. Battling opposing locals, venturing into love, and protecting her battered twin sister, Inti’s overweening focus is the wolves and the precarity of their fate. The author is a beautiful stylist and I sank into the wonderfully portrayed scenes of wolves in the wild, bumping into the ravenous world of humans. The feverish plot is less successful, IMHO, perhaps too wild in pace and extent, but that storyline meshes well into the thematic one. The central character of Inti is brilliantly portrayed. Snap up Once There Were Wolves, I’m sure it will figure in the awards season.

“The Books of Jacob,” a 2014 novel recently and superbly translated by Jennifer Croft, is not for the faint-hearted. Over its thousand-plus pages teeming with hundreds of names and places, set in 18th-century Poland, Austria, and Turkey, in boggy towns and lush cities, Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk adopts a presidential omniscient stance but feels free to use letters, snippets, a ghost, different tenses, and so on and so on. Sometimes it seems like every page is just too dense to carry on, but after early slowness, I warmed to the sheer flood of detail and poetic descriptions. The Jacob of the title is Jacob Frank (although he ends up using many names), a charismatic prophet who seems to want to unite the region’s disparate religions—Jewish, Muslim, and Catholic—into a pantheistic mishmash of portent and vagueness. And Jacob Frank is no Christ wannabe, he’s a handsome, gnarly, trickster character echoing all those cult leaders we have come to know over history. Like many of them, he uses charisma and sex and human nature to dominate his flocks, which in some years grow into mobs. Over the decades of his surprisingly long life, the prophet morphs and relocates, ducks and weaves, always using up his disciples. After my initial bafflement, I learned to relax into the compendious, earthy yet intellectual detail, and by the end, I was quite moved by a sense of having participated in something approaching holiness (even as Frank’s grubby behavior obviously disqualified such an emotion). The Books of Jacob is a welcome avalanche of a book, definitely worth the reading effort.