'The Final Detail' will keep you awake at nights and wake you up early in the mornings. It will make you push out people from your house so you can be alone and just immerse yourself deep into the book without any interruptions. Experience says so.The story goes as such: Myron has run away with Terese to some unknown place and nobody knows where, not even his best friends Win and Esperanza. Sometime soon, Win arrives (even though he really didn't know where Myron was, he somehow knew - go wonder!)and lets Myron know of the developments back home during his runaway stint. Esperanza, now his business partner, is arrested for the murder of Clu Haid. Clu is their client, fast on the road of self-destruction with drugs and women. There's two hundred thousand dollars missing from his account. There is a murder weapon and blood found in Myron and Esperanza's office and company car. Myron wants to do everything...anything...to help Esperanza but she strictly tells him to buzz off. As we all know Myron, this just makes him more adamant in staying on the case.The story on the surface goes like this. But as you read the book, it takes you far into past and brings out connections that you could have never imagined. Very cleverly executed, each chapter has a twist, leaving you wanting more.The characters are simply fascinating. Clu Haid is not alive in the book, and yet you know his character completely. Esperanza is ever so lovable. So dignified is she even in the prison orange jumpsuit. As I said - lovable. There's Clu Haid's wife Bonnie, there's Sophie Mayor, there's Frank Ache Jr. - all wonderfully sketched characters.There's Cyndi. She likes to be called Big Cyndi. And boy-oh-boy, is she big! The paragraphs that Harlan Coben spends describing her physique, her looks, her clothes, her mannerisms are just so funny and totally worth it! It's a challenge to not laugh when it comes to Myron's internal dialogues when around Big Cyndi.Hester Crimstein makes an appearance yet again. Snappy as she always is, you either hate her for being arrogant or you just love her for being intimidatingly clever.There's Myron's parents, Ellen and Al. They are funny. Smart. Intelligent. Wise. Witty. A pain in Myron's ass. Well, they are Myron's parents. Period.And then there's Myron and Win. As Espranza puts it "For you Myron, Win is a cold dose of reality, and Win, on the other hand, seems to view you as his humanity." One is not complete without the other. Both question the other's way of life but never judge. Myron can be such a tender-heart sometimes, that you need a Win to balance him. And Win can be so dark, that you need a Myron to show you hope.When Coben keeps referring to Myron, Win and Esperanza as 'his best friend' and 'her best friend', it leaves such a childish impact - considering they are 30-something adults. But when you see the friendship and the innocence and the unconditional love for each other, you just end up wishing you too had such a 'best friend'.The one chapter between Myron and his dad is very beautiful.Somewhere in the book, Myron has one whole chapter dedicated to the thrills of baseball. I have no inclination towards baseball, but the passion with which the chapter is written, now makes me wonder.Sophie Mayor and Myron's conversation about hunting is thought-provoking.Myron and Thrill's discussion on sexuality at Take A Guess deserves an applause.The last 20 pages left me speechless. Such deep thoughts. Such introspection. Degrees of guilt. Degrees of innocence. Friendship. Love. Belongingness. These last twenty pages have overpowered the first 300-something pages of excellent writing.I am totally in awe of Harlan Coben for creating characters that grow so close to you as if you have known them forever and whatever they do or feel, affects you too.
As usual Coben offers up a fine mix of twists, turns, and action sequences that make for a fine thriller. However, in this instance, Coben's work is even deeper than usual. This time, Coben offers a series of dialogues about morality that make one wonder if he has wandered into a debate team meeting. Right and wrong, sexuality, and life in general is discussed in different sections of the novel that not only fit into the story, but offer some serious food for thought.Right in the middle of this novel, Myron Bolitar, our hero, goes to visit Yankee Stadium, and there, the author launches into a 2-3 page essay on the thrill of baseball and its relationship to a young man growing up. This beautiful and thrilling essay would be a fine piece as a stand alone essay, but serves to propel the story along almost seamlessly. Coben also drops some fun tidbits, sort of like an enticing trail of candy leading us to the witch's candy house in the woods. These tidbits are reminders of television days gone by. Myron's crush on Major Nelson's Jeannie and her evil twin, Julie Newmar in a catwoman outfit, and other wonderful reminders of my own childhood spent in front of the boob tube. These tidbits add wonderful flavor to a powerful mystery.And then, there's always Win, the playboy vigilante extradionaire. As I've said in earlier reviews of Coben's work, Win is essentially a plainclothese Batman.. Sort of a cross between James Bond and Batman. In fact, Win even has a red phone under a clear cake glass in honor of his childhood hero that he is somewhat emulating in real life.The Final Detail is not the best of the Coben novels, but it comes close. Powerful, enchanting, and chocked full of ideas, not just story.
What do You think about The Final Detail (2000)?
Ironically, I just finished a Michael Coben book (Trunk Music #6) where Harry Bosch tells his team that when they solve the mystery, it will be in the details, the details that they were looking at all along, right on the front of the report. For The Final Detail by Coben, it was indeed in the details, but in this particular book the reader doesn't get to see them ahead of time. Instead, the reader is told piecemeal, usually after Myron figures out what was happening and goes to The Big Confrontation. I'm not sure I like this method of storytelling, because then I don't have enough of the information to try and figure out the mystery for myself.The Final Detail was perhaps less about the mystery than Myron coping with morality and the ramification of his actions. In the last book he left the love of his life - Jessica - after realizing that maybe she wasn't the love of his life after all, he still feels responsible for the death of the woman who came between him and Jessica. Myron ran away from his friends, family, and business, and that's what took a hit in a bad, bad way. Esperanza is being framed for the murder of his first client, the rest of MB Sportsrep clients are leaving in droves to the competition, and his father had a heart attack. Ironically, it was this last that hit Myron the hardest. So, what we have is a mystery about the frailty of ourselves and the ramifications of our actions. Myron comes up with a metaphor that life is all about the foul line - we want to think we stay inside that line, but that line isn't always clearly defined. I enjoyed this book, I found myself sitting in the garage and my parking pace at work trying to squeeze in "just five more minutes", but it's not your standard mystery.
—Kristin
THE FINAL DETAIL (Pub. 1999) is Harlan Coben's sixth book in his Myron Bolitar series and his eighth published novel. It was a great read, but not my favorite of his.The opening sucked me right in. I love the way Coben kicks it off with Myron Bolitar licking his wounds on a small island, ensconced with a woman he'd just met at a party, who was also looking for succor and escape. But the island retreat gets interrupted when Win shows up, with news that Myron's business partner, Esperanza, has been arrested for the murder of one of Myron's clients.Coben does a great job of intricately weaving plot points together, giving us a mystery along with his usual great turns-of-phrase and a fast paced story.****SPOILER ALERT****What kept me from giving this one all five stars was the ending. It felt a bit like letting the air out of tires. I never really got the point as to why Esperanza refused to speak with Myron or defend herself, and the author makes such a big deal out of it, I was just sure there was going to be a huge pay-off on the 'why'. Nope. I'm withholding a fifth star for it.I also found the 'back in the day' reason behind why his client, Clu, ends up dead a little ho-hum. Partly because the reason behind the murder wasn't current stuff, so it took the thrill factor down several notches for me.At the end of page 389, it was an overall good read, so it gets 4-stars. I recommend it as entertaining. The story itself didn't linger in my mind for days afterward, but I enjoyed the ride.
—Alex
In this summer I read the book "The Final Detail" by Harlan Coben. I chose this book mainly because I enjoyed reading another book of his, "Miracle Cure" earlier this year. Only after I had finished this book I found out it is a part of a series and it is the 6th book but I didn’t notice it and I understood most of the characters. This book talks about Myron, a sports agent that is brought back from a vacation on the Caribbean's in order to help drop the charges against his friend and partner, Esperanza of murdering their client. In this book he needs to dig through his client's last few days in order to understand who really murdered him. It turned out that the murderer was…What I really liked in this book is that some of the plot took place in bizarre places, that I had never been to, like the club "Take a Guess" where you don’t know if the person in front of you is a man, a woman, a man dressed like woman or the other way around. And that was only one of the places… I really enjoyed reading this book – just like all the other Harlan Coben books I have read before. However, I would recommend you to start from the beginning of this series in order to understand the characters better.
—Matan
