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JUST ONE LOOK is Harlan Coben doing what he does best -- portraying ordinary people trying to deal with extraordinary circumstances. The book starts innocently enough. Grace Lawson, a mother-of-two, nips into a photo shop to pick up some holiday snaps. Among them is one she doesn't recognise, a much older picture with her husband Jack on. Within hours he has taken one look at the photo and legged it -- and a hitman has the family in his sights. As I was reading JUST ONE LOOK, I came up with a thoroughly unlikely comparison -- the under-rated English writer Margaret Yorke. But before you all laugh at me, pointing out that one writes about small English towns and villages, and the other 21st century New Jersey, let me add that menace in a familiar setting is what both do so well. After reading both of these authors, you are liable to start staring worriedly at the neighbours and wondering what goes on behind other people's lace curtains and shutters! I've been snotty about Coben's hairpin bends plotting in the past -- TELL NO ONE made me hopping mad. But this time it works, although I had great difficulty suspending disbelief for the final twist. But Coben gets away it, mainly for the vitality and lucidity of his writing. His distinctive voice is wonderful, and he's one of the few writers who can throw present tense into his narration and make it sound fresh and natural and not an affectation. There are some familiar faces from his other books here, including hitman Eric Wu, and there's also a mention for Esperanza, Myron Bolitar's sidekick. Grace herself is a meaty character, carrying enough personal baggage to make her interesting, but not so much that she slips into cliched dysfunctional. The only disappointment for me was the character of Scott Duncan, on leave from the US attorney's office and with his own mystery to solve. He is a mere blip on the landscape when it feels like he should be a more substantial presence -- rather like ex-FBI agent Rachel was in TELL NO ONE. So yes, it's pretty much more of the same from Coben, but who cares when you can tell a story like he can -- he's one of modern crime fiction's wiliest plotters!
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, June 2004
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