"Long Lost" by Harlan Coben: Book Review

"Long Lost" by Harlan Coben
Dutton, 371 pp.,$27.95
Reviewed by David Marshall James

Uber NYC sports & talent agent Myron Bolitar has returned with a vengeance, in every sense of that word.
Don't cross MB when he is defending the rights of the wronged. He'll smash your nose into a spurting fountain, or perhaps even rip out your trachea.
You gotta hate when that happens-- if you're the one who's being de-windpiped. When Bolitar does it, he's Batman, because you know his breathless victim deserves it, and probably a whole lot worse.
Author Harlan Coben has delivered more thrills than a-- well, something really snarky and "Sex and the City" could fit in here, could fill this void. So to speak.
Nevertheless, we'll leave the snarkiness to Bolitar's best bud, Windsor "Win" Lockwood, he of the family billions and global can-do, with a flick of the latest electronic device, and some that probably won't be on the market till year after next. He's James Bond by way of "The Philadelphia Story."
Yes, we're stalling here. And we won't even go in-depth into Bolitar's Gal Fridays: Big Cyndi and Esperanza. Picture Roz Russell on steroids, and with implants, respectively.
However, we're not going to give away the plot, neither bit by bit nor blow by blow. We like our noses and tracheas intact, thank you very much.
Yet, we will reveal that the narrative hinges upon the return of Bolitar's lover emerita, Terese Collins, an ex-CNN anchorwoman who has dropped out of his life, far away, for years, but who places an urgent summons to Paris.
Yes, Bolitar caves, but you could deduce that from the dust-jacket cover art, featuring a jet flying over Notre Dame cathedral. From Paris, we wind up in London, then we land in places that even MB cannot recall (you'll understand when it happens). Then it's back to NYC, and Win's palace of an apartment on the Upper West Side, along with Bolitar's parents' old home, which he now owns, in Livingston, N.J.
Coben, for all his literary globe-trotting, always brings it back to Jersey-- and, in some books, pretty much keeps it there.
Well, you know Coben (and should if you don't): His story could be transpiring inside a corrugated-metal warehouse off Interstate Anywhere and still deliver those "top drawer of the nightstand" thrills. He's a hoot when he wants to be, which is fortunately fairly often, as well as an acerbically humorous social and cultural critic, with a panoply of pop-culture references to illuminate his observations. Furthermore, he raises his usual quota of ethical conundrums.
All that makes for quite a package, as Win might put it.