Hello, readers of Hive!
I'd like to share my thoughts about the last book I finished, "The Stranger".
A thriller novel by Harlan Coben, NOT to be confused with the much more famous work by the same name from Albert Camus!
This was an enjoyable enough read for me, with some elements that worked well while others were a bit lackluster. It ultimately amounts to a fine summer read and I'll tell you all in detail soon.
About the author
This is a writer I've known of for quite a while and yet I never felt the temptation to pick up one of his books. In my mind I tend to group him together with Patricia Cornwell, Dean Koontz and other thriller writers who don't seem to have ever had a big breakaway success but somehow still managed to stay ahead of the curve and achieve a long carreer with many books published under their name.
In Harlan Coben's case a somewhat recent wave of success must have come his way when several of his thrillers were adapted for Netflix's british viewers. "The Stranger" was one of the books chosen for adaptation and was made into a miniseries.
I did not watch the series but as I understand it some alterations have been made to the story and characters in order to adapt it for the new medium.
As a side note, in my mind I always connected this author with the fictional character Harlan Thrombey from the movie "Knives Out" which is a personal favorite of mine.
The fact they work in the same niche and have the same unique first name always seemed too much of a coincidence for me and I like to think this was a cheeky way from writer and director Rian Johnson to pay homage to Harlan Coben. What do you think?? Am I reading too much into it?
How did I choose this book?
As I said, I wasn't necessarily planning to read any of Coben's books anytime soon and it was partly chance if I did so.
In my recent trip to France I spent quite a bit of time in book stores. English books, catering to a more international audience, were somewhat hard to find there and among this small selection of titles "The Stanger" somewhat stood out.
I'm not really sure what marketing considerations have been made for this particular cover of the book with the purple title as it doesn't really seem to match the tone and atmosphere of the story.
Similarly, the short summary provided in the back of the book also didn't particularly make it stand out.
What ultimately made me interested in it was the fact that the book was entirely annotated on the margins, as you will see from some examples that I will provide.
The book is written in english but a lot of the key words and expressions have been translated into french as well. As a result, this type of book is ideal for french readers wanting to improve their english but I suppose it could work the other way around too.
I found the idea very cute and since the book was cheap I decided to take a chance on it.
If anything, it will be an interesting memento of my leisurly time spent in France 😉
Ultimately I didn't care too much for the annotations as I was reading but there were still a couple that I thought were funny and I will include the relative excerpts down here.
In the first example we have the proverbial expression "in for a penny, in for a pound" which is translated into what I can only imagine (with my scholastic french) would sound like "once you pour the wine you might as well drink it"
What a funny translation 🤣🤣
In this other case, as you can see, there's talk of bringing out "the big guns" which is translated as "grosse Bertha", an impressive piece of German artillery used in World War I.
Summary
With some of my ramblings finally out of the way, let's see what this story is about.
Our protagonist is Adam, a middle aged lawyer with a wife and two teenage sons.
This family lives in a small New Jersey town where everyone seems to have "made it".
Yes, the American dream fully delivered its promises for the people there and everyone seems to have settled into the slow rhytm of suburban life.
Much of the energy of the parents living in this town is devoted towards the local lacrosse program, instrumental to guaranteeing that kids will be accepted in prestigious schools.
The author doesn't like to waste any time (he's got that going for him) and the inciting incident is presented right from the get-go, in the very first chapter.
Adam is approached by a mysterious stranger who informs him with a dispassionate tone that he's been lied to by his wife.
The substance of this supposed lie has to do with some services provided by the sordid underworld of the internet. Seemingly innocent and colorful websites are a facade for some morally dubious operations. The stranger claims that Adam's wife, Corinne would have requested such services in the past and then leaves leaving Adam dumbfounded.
At first Adam fights this revelation but it doesn't take long for him to start doubting the honesty of his wife.
Adam decides to confront his wife and a fracture forms in the household which will cause Corinne to step away from her beloved family to take some time for herself and review her options.
Drama and mystery will follow.
I've found the setup quite compelling as we're presented with several different unknowns.
Did Corinne really lie to her husband? If so, why?? And more importantly, what does the stranger stand to gain by revealing such things to people that don't even know him??
As the story progresses it's revealed that the stranger knows secrets of other people too and is traveling all over the place on a seemingly fanatical mission to help the world with the power of truth.
At the same time several different moving parts will start to collide with one another and a wave of crime and murder will hit this peaceful town.
Characters
The main characters in the story are:
Adam, the protagonist
Corinne, Adam's wife. She works as an high school teacher and is an extremely devoted mother
The stranger, as close as what it gets to an antagonist in this story. A mysterious figure whose agenda is not clear
Joanna, an out-of-town cop that is not officially working the cases caused by the mayhem of the stranger and his revelations. She's not necessarily an expert detective but still puts everything on the line after a person close to her gets killed
Most of the story is told from the point of view of Adam but there'll be occasional short switches to other perspectives too.
There's many other characters too that play smaller roles for the sake of the economy of the story but I did not have much trouble following along. Trust me, I'm not great at it. If I could do it, you can too!
Among the other characters some relevant ones are Adam's and Corinne's teenage sons as well as the various neighbors and colleagues of the parents.
Paradoxically out of the main characters the protagonist was the least fleshed-out one.
As you can imagine this detered me from enjoying the book more.
Adam is definetely a bit dull as a character.
He's the classic clean-shaven suburban dad. A reasonable and educated man that provides for his family.
But that's about it. He almost feels like a cardboard cut out for good portions of the story.
There's nothing very specific about him.
He caves in and is persuaded by the insinuations of the stranger about his wife. He stops trusting her and will pay the price for it.
He's basically a man going through a mid-life crisis. He's come at a point where he realizes a lot of time has passed since he's youth and his decisions back then have shaped what remains of his life. He doesn't always navigate all this in the best way possible.
At the same time, when his family is in danger it's shown that he'll do whatever he can to make sure they're safe.
Although we don't get to spend as much time with Corinne I personally enjoyed her much more than Adam.
At first she's presented as the stereotypical helicopter parent, bossy and demanding.
She acts out of love for her family but wants to constantly plan everything out and be kept in the loop when it comes to her sons life.
In a way, the first plot twist could be considered the revelation of a sweeter and at the same time more reckless side of Corinne subverting the expectation that the readers might have of her as just an annoying and overbearing mother.
For most of the story the stranger remains a puzzling figure so I won't go into much detail about him but just from the exchange he has with Adam in the beginning he comes off as someone smart, a bit twisted but not without ideals.
In general his existence is a compelling part of the story that kept my interest piqued.
At the same time, his character becomes a bit of a let-down later on in the story as there's a short chapter that describes the supposed justification for his erratic and destructive behaviour.
Personally, I didn't really but it and I thought it was a weak point of the writing of this book.
I'm sure every reader will sometimes think "less is more" about the author choices and that was definetely the case for me here.
This whole part of his character that is shown later didn't convince me at all.
I think the intention was to make him a more well-rounded and sympathetic villain but the whole thing seemed quickly put together without too much thought behind it and ultimately the story would work just as well without this weird inclusion.
Similarly there's also another negative character that is introduced later on and some sort of justification is brought up for why he does what he does. In that case this type of detail worked a little bit better for me, but not by a large margin.
Ultimately these additions by the author made the story feel a bit more awkward.
Themes
Although the novel it's ultimately a thriller there's still several different situations and themes that Harlan Coben touches upon here.
The main one has for sure to do with secrets and lies.
To quote the Chernobyl TV series, "What is the cost of lies?"
This is certainly a question that some of these characters would ask themselves as they fight to keep some uncomfortable truths hidden.
Some of these lies have to do with Adam and Corinne, although they're not as simple as some formulaic betrayal of a partner through a one-night stand. There's a bit of an exploration of what can happen to a family when a breach of trust is discovered.
The book also operates timidly on a socio-economic level.
As I've said this is a very pleasant and desirable town to live in and there's multiple references to the American dream. But whatever that might have been once upon a time has been perverted and corrupted.
There's a lot of talk of "mom and pop" shops closing down, businesses failing, houses being on foreclosure, difficulty in finding jobs and so on. At one point we even get a cheeky and not too subtle reference to Bruce Spingsteen🎸. Yes, yes. The common folk is definetely going through hardships in this story, we get it.
However it's not a melancholic look at past times that the author offers. Instead what we see are parents competing with one another to ensure the success of their children and families in very fierce ways.
Money is definetely the motivating factor for a lot of what happens in this story.
Then, there's of course a lot of focus on family dynamics. Mostly through the point of view of Adam as an husband and father.
Considering this is a thriller and it has to balance a few things at once this theme worked surprisingly well for me. There's this very sweet and intimate dimension that the book gets to at times where it's explored how difficult it is to be a modern parent.
We're shown all the subtle lines moms and dads have to tip-toe around in order to get the best out of their children. All the awkwardness and the challenges.
At the same time, Adama and Corinee are not just parents but also spouses and the book does a good job of going through some of the tropes such as the pitfalls a married couple can fall into.
But it does so with some tenderness ( for instance when recounting how they met and what ambitions they had when younger ) and it manages at the same time to keep the story in motion with all its more engaging elements. At the heart of this, there's an exploration of some scary concepts. How well does Adam know and trust his wife?
Once all is set into motion and Adam's family seems to be the eye of the storm he needs to find a nice balance in reassuring his family that all is going to be okay, keep up with his duties of an adult and a father while at the same time take on a world of criminals he might not exactly be prepared for.
Lastly there's an element of the story that has to do with technology and the world of information that the book grapples with at times.
There's not an exact indication for when the story is supposed to be set but the book was published in 2015 and it's safe to assume the story should be placed exactly around there.
Some plot points involve bitcoin (which would have likely been just an obscure phenomenon in its infancy and hardly regulated at all back then) as well as the infamous "Silk Road" website, which on its own sould be a "funny" rabbit hole to go through for all true crime aficionados.
Some other plot devices include smartphones and location-tracking apps.
So that should give you a good idea of the world these characters are living in.
Conclusions
I purposefully avoided to talk too much about the thriller plot since that would spoil all the fun for potential readers but as a whole the book worked decently well for me.
There were definetely some moments of either dialogue and exposition that felt a bit too cheesy, preachy or just simply badly put together.
Towards the end there's a tendency from the author to overexplain things that took me out of it a bit.
It's not perfect by any means but if you're willing to look past some of these things it's a decently fun and fast-paced thriller without too much dead weight on it.
I was able to read it all in just a few days, turning pages over pages to find out what would happen next which is as good an endorsement as it gets for a book of this kind.
The story seemed believable except for a few points here and there but as a whole I felt satisfied by the various twists coming my way. Couldn't really ever see them coming, exactly.
The information was drip-fed in such a way that the story was always engaging.
The chapters were really short and almost always added something interesting for the sake of the story.
And ultimately the ending was uncompromising and unforgiving. And at least to me, it came as a surprise!
As I understand from researching on sites such as goodreads this is not the absolute best work of Harlan Coben and it definetely has some weak points.
I'm thinking that if this is not his best work and it still left me positively impressed overall it might not be a bad idea for me in the future to check out some of his other novels too whenever I'll be in need the mood for some lighter thriller reads.
What do you think? Have you read any of his novels??
Feel free to leave some feedback, I would appreciate it 😉
I hope you enjoyed my review!
I'm still trying to grow my following here on Hive and it's been tough for some of my last posts in this community to reach many people.
If you're interested in more book reviews from me I'll leave them below, in case you might be curious. I'd still love for people to read them.
This was my first post in this community and it's a combined review of "Normal People" by Sally Rooney, "Smilla's sense of Snow" by Peter Høeg and a short book by Stephen King called "The Colorado Kid".
And this here was my review of "Lord of the flies", a great classic.
Lastly I will include my physical TBR down here.
"Those who walk away" by Patricia Highsmith
"This Sweet Sickness" by Patricia Highsmith
"Catch 22" by Joseph Heller
"The Master and Margarita" by Michail Bulgakov
"The Tin Drum" by Günter Grass
"The Luck of Barry Lyndon" by William Thackeray
"Atonement" by Ian McEwan
"Cat and Mouse" by Christianna Brandt
"The Thursday Murder Club" by Richard Osman
"Vineland" by Thomas Pynchon
Happy reading, everyone! 😁📚
Until next time! 🤙