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Hold Tight! Story Moves From 1 Crisis To The Next

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By AL HUTCHISON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 27, 2008

"Hold Tight," by Harlan Coben (Dutton, $26.95)

To read this fast-paced novel is to hope that the events Harlan Coben describes will never, ever happen to you. But maybe they will, and that's the point.

For the most part, this is a story of ordinary people, in a small New Jersey community, who are caught up in extraordinary situations that, at least conceivably, could confront almost any of us.

How many parents have lost sleep worrying that their teenage children may be into drugs or that their behavior will be altered by a friend's suicide? And how many parents don't know how to respond to such concerns? How many good teachers have, in a moment of weakness, said something stupid in the classroom, something they would regret for the rest of their lives?

There are many other moments of personal crisis in "Hold Tight."

A lawyer has to choose between following her boss's orders or rushing to the side of her suddenly vulnerable husband, a doctor who has paid a terrible price for following his son into a sleazy neighborhood in New York City. A fretful mother has to decide how much of her shameful past she's willing to disclose to a surprisingly unsympathetic doctor to help her son get the kidney transplant he desperately needs to save his life. A newly promoted detective has to cope with the deep and extremely visible resentment of the blatantly sexist man who formerly held her job.

The detective comes into the story because there has been a particularly brutal, sadistic murder that, from all appearances, has nothing to do with all the other conflicts the author explores. And when a woman vanishes after a shopping trip to Target, the police wonder if a serial killer is on the loose.

The reader knows (but the police don't, at least initially) that there's a strong connection between the murder and the disappearance of the shopper, although the exact nature of that connection unravels slowly.

In the meantime, the reader learns a great deal about the backgrounds of the killer (oddly enough, a graduate of prestigious Williams College) and his partner, a woman who was traumatized by the brutality that accompanied the disintegration of her former country, Yugoslavia.

So, yes, this is a murder mystery, but somehow Coben has managed to make the killer one of his lesser characters.

His story, while critical to the plot in its own way, is also exceptional. He's not like us. So the greater interest is in those of Coben's characters who are decidedly normal, at least in most respects. Unlike the killer's, their lives until recently have been relatively straightforward and unlikely to attract notice.

"Hold Tight" is really about how these ordinary people are forced to cope with circumstances - some of them potentially lethal - they never would have foreseen, and readers should find it easier to identify with them and their problems than with an unbalanced person who indulges in murder.

Readers should also find this a book that's very hard to put down.

Al Hutchison of Citrus County is a freelance writer.

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