Gone For Good

Jonathan Marosz provides a straightforward no-frills narration for this suspenseful story, which pits Will Klein, a youth worker, against the FBI and the master criminals who were his fugitive older brother's friends growing up. While Marosz's narrative style is not exciting, it is serviceable and allows the listener to follow the intricate twists of the plot with ease. It also gives the listener some needed distance from the depictions of cruelty and evil that Will encounters as he tries to find out why every woman he ever loves ends up murdered. D.T.H. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine

April 1, 2002
"We never forget our first love. Mine ended up being murdered." Newcomers and fans alike will know they're deep in Coben country with the author's ninth book, in which a counselor of runaways with his own history of broken hearts and death finds himself caught in a web of lost identities, forgotten nemeses and smoldering grudges. Will Klein was a nice Jewish boy from a nice Jersey suburb until his ex-girlfriend was found strangled next door and his brother became an international fugitive. Eleven years later, as his mother succumbs to cancer, Will gets the deathbed confession that his brother, Ken, is alive; around the same time, his girlfriend, Sheila (herself a runaway with a "murky past"), disappears and a neighborhood psycho called the Ghost resurfaces. Will is yanked into an FBI investigation via his friend Squares (a yogi whose forehead tattoo carries multiple meanings), which jumbles up the aforementioned cast of characters with another mystery occurring in the Midwest. True to form, Coben keeps the plot twists coming fast and furious, and readers will give up trying to guess the outcome quite early on; yet the book's entertainment value lies less in its plot than its characters. From the New York streetwalker Raquel ("Many transvestites are beautiful. Raquel was not. He was black, six-six, and comfortably on the north side of three hundred pounds") to Belmont, Neb.'s Sheriff Bertha Farrow ("Murder scenes were bad, but for overall vomit-inducing, bone-crunching, head-splitting, blood-splattering grossness, it was hard to beat the metal-against-flesh effect of an old-fashioned automobile accident"), this title delivers.

The disappearance/reappearance theme that played so well in TELL NO ONE drives Coben's new novel. Dylan Baker lays out an intriguing tale of Will Klein's search for his fugitive brother, leading listeners through each false trail and deception. Baker does his best with the thriller, but the abridgment disappoints. Not surprisingly, the emphasis of this adaptation is on the action, abundant with violence, but further character development would have been welcome. Baker's narrative and psychological portraits are strong, but some of the bad guys don't have sufficient menace for their words and deeds. This doesn't have the staying power of Coben's other successes. R.F.W. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine