Harlan Coben's
auspicious first mystery
released in hard cover
''Deal Breaker''
By Harlan Coben
(Delacorte Press, 339 pp., $24)
Buy at Amazon
Reviewed by John Orr
July 2006
''Deal Breaker'' by Harlan Coben is Harlan
Coben's first novel, originally published in paperback, in 1995. It
introduces Myron Bolitar, the
sports agent with a big heart, a bad knee and a very good friend named
Windsor Horne
Lockwood III, aka Win. This story involves a football player, a girlfriend
who may be dead
and a blackmail plot. The Bolitar series went on for seven excellent novels,
then Coben took a
break to write five stand-alones (a couple of which are brilliant), then
recently came
back with another Bolitar book, ''Promise Me.'' Coben's first, ''Deal
Breaker,'' is
astonishing for a first novel. No weaknesses -- all the meat on them
bones is cherce, as
Spencer Tracy said (about Katharine Hepburn). Coben fans may well want to
start the series
again in hardcover; no doubt their paperbacks are getting a little dogeared
by now.
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