I have never read a Harlan Coben book before. I keep confusing him with Dennis Lehane. Whenever I see anything about Harlan Coben, I always think “oh, yeah, he wrote Mystic River, I really want to read that. Wait. NO HE DIDN’T”. But I loved the French movie they made from his book Tell No-One and the plot for this sounded super intriguing so I thought what the heck.
So the titular time period is how long lapses between Jake Sanders watching the love of his life Natalie Avery, marry another man and said man turning up dead. At the wedding, Natalie made Jake promise to leave her alone, which Jake did. But, with The Other Guy now out of the picture, Jake goes to the funeral to get a glimpse of the woman he’s been carrying a torch for all this time. Only the grieving widow is absolutely not Natalie. Jake begins to break his promise to Natalie, that he would leave her alone, and begins to retrace the path of their all too brief affair. Only the place they met doesn’t seem to exist and people who knew them both at the time don’t seem to remember him either. So Jake keeps on digging until he realises all too late in the day that he REALLY SHOULD HAVE LISTENED when Natalie made him promise to back off.
I’ll say this for the book, it rattles along at a fair old pace and I happily got caught up in it and wanted to see exactly how it was going to play out. I love plots like this in crime novels (Linwood Barclay’s No Time For Goodbye is still the pinnacle for me) so I was all “oooh, I wonder what the heck is going on, I bet it’s awesome”. The problem with the book, rattling along and readable as it is, I didn’t buy a single word of it. Characters were either too convoluted to be believable (Jake is a lecturer at a university. A fellow lecturer there used to work for the FBI, when they weren’t being an undersecretary of state. I’m so sure, Harlan.), or their actions were too annoying or incredulous to really get behind. Jake meets Natalie, they have a crazy passionate love at first sight relationship, but she pulls a volte face and says “oh, this dude I dated once, he’s totally the one. I’m marrying him. Come to the wedding, but after that never look for me again”. So far, so far-fetched. But Jake honours that promise. For six years. He doesn’t at any point think “I don’t buy this insane wedding” or “I wonder how Natalie is doing” and have a brief little social media cyberstalk. Come on now. That’s not really a plot point that had me saying “wow yeah totally get it”.
Leaving aside the fact that Jake is told several many times to stop looking for Natalie or he’s going to get her and other people killed if he doesn’t, but he doesn’t (douchebag), what Jake finds out along the way stretches the credibility further, until the final pages lay it all out for you and rather than going “oh my holy wow that’s just I had no idea oh my god”, you’re far likelier to roll your eyes and say “give me strength”. You know how you’ll spot a loose thread on a shirt and go to pick it out, only to find it’s unravelled a whole sleeve and the shirt is fucked? This book is full of plot points like that. I took issue with so many little points about technology and the like only to find if I applied enough thought, I’d knocked over the entire house of cards. That said, it’s never not entertaining. It’s just not quite the impenetrable and smart mystery Coben thinks it is.