Darkest Fear

Amazon.com Review

Myron Bolitar's father's recent heart attack brings Myron smack into a midlife encounter with issues of adulthood and mortality. And if that's not enough to turn his life upside down, the reappearance of his first serious girlfriend is. The basketball star turned sports agent, who does a little detecting when business is slow, is saddened by the news that Emily Downing's 13-year-old son is dying and desperately needs a bone marrow transplant; even if she did leave him for the man who destroyed his basketball career, he wouldn't wish tsuris like that on anyone. And he's not at all interested in getting involved with Emily again, not even to track down the one mysterious donor who may be able to save the boy. But when Myron learns that Jeremy Downing is his own son, conceived the night before Emily and Greg Downing married, he embarks on a search for someone who disappeared a lifetime ago. And what he finds leads him to a powerful family determined to keep an old secret, a disgraced reporter who may have plagiarized a novel to create a serial killer, a very interested FBI agent, and a missing child.

This is the seventh outing in a series that's been gaining in popularity since Bolitar's first appearance, in Harlan Coben's Deal Breaker. Myron's a bit of a baby, but he's not afraid to get rough when the situation calls for it, he's eminently likable, and his heart's in the right place. The fireworks are supplied by his friend and partner, Win, who really deserves a series of his own, and Esperanza, the lesbian wrestler-lawyer who has finally talked Myron into making her a partner in the business. Like Coben's other Bolitar novels, she's worth every penny. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

Book seven in Coben's wonderfully rich series (after 1999's The Final Detail), which features sports agent Myron Bolitar, former basketball player and totally believable human being, is all about fathers, sons and the intricate and often painful chains that link them together. Myron, who has just moved out of his parents' house at the age of 34, is worried about his father's health after a heart attack, but it's hard for either of them to talk about the older man's condition. Myron tends to have long relationships with women that end in tears. ("You're in your mid-thirties, single, sensitive, and you like show tunes," says his current lover, a troubled television star. "If you were a better dresser, I'd say you were gay.") Emily, his college girlfriend from Duke who dumped him for a more successful basketball rival, re-enters the picture to tell him that her critically ill 13-year-old son needs a bone marrow transplant, but the only suitable registered donor has disappeared. Can Myron find him? And, by the way--Myron is the boy's real father. The search takes Myron deep into some decades-old unsolved crimes involving another father and son--a sadistic deranged killer and a conflicted newspaper columnist. Myron's deadly preppy friend, Win, is on hand to supply his own frightening brand of violence, and the gorgeous Esperanza Diaz, the former wrestler who's now a full partner in MB SportsReps, supplies wisdom as well as glamour. But the heart of the novel is, as always, the fallible but infinitely appealing, accessible figure of Myron Bolitar--a modern Don Quixote complete with knee brace and cell phone, ready to take on the world's problems. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Amazon.com Review

Myron Bolitar's father's recent heart attack brings Myron smack into a midlife encounter with issues of adulthood and mortality. And if that's not enough to turn his life upside down, the reappearance of his first serious girlfriend is. The basketball star turned sports agent, who does a little detecting when business is slow, is saddened by the news that Emily Downing's 13-year-old son is dying and desperately needs a bone marrow transplant; even if she did leave him for the man who destroyed his basketball career, he wouldn't wish tsuris like that on anyone. And he's not at all interested in getting involved with Emily again, not even to track down the one mysterious donor who may be able to save the boy. But when Myron learns that Jeremy Downing is his own son, conceived the night before Emily and Greg Downing married, he embarks on a search for someone who disappeared a lifetime ago. And what he finds leads him to a powerful family determined to keep an old secret, a disgraced reporter who may have plagiarized a novel to create a serial killer, a very interested FBI agent, and a missing child.

This is the seventh outing in a series that's been gaining in popularity since Bolitar's first appearance, in Harlan Coben's Deal Breaker. Myron's a bit of a baby, but he's not afraid to get rough when the situation calls for it, he's eminently likable, and his heart's in the right place. The fireworks are supplied by his friend and partner, Win, who really deserves a series of his own, and Esperanza, the lesbian wrestler-lawyer who has finally talked Myron into making her a partner in the business. Like Coben's other Bolitar novels, she's worth every penny. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

Book seven in Coben's wonderfully rich series (after 1999's The Final Detail), which features sports agent Myron Bolitar, former basketball player and totally believable human being, is all about fathers, sons and the intricate and often painful chains that link them together. Myron, who has just moved out of his parents' house at the age of 34, is worried about his father's health after a heart attack, but it's hard for either of them to talk about the older man's condition. Myron tends to have long relationships with women that end in tears. ("You're in your mid-thirties, single, sensitive, and you like show tunes," says his current lover, a troubled television star. "If you were a better dresser, I'd say you were gay.") Emily, his college girlfriend from Duke who dumped him for a more successful basketball rival, re-enters the picture to tell him that her critically ill 13-year-old son needs a bone marrow transplant, but the only suitable registered donor has disappeared. Can Myron find him? And, by the way--Myron is the boy's real father. The search takes Myron deep into some decades-old unsolved crimes involving another father and son--a sadistic deranged killer and a conflicted newspaper columnist. Myron's deadly preppy friend, Win, is on hand to supply his own frightening brand of violence, and the gorgeous Esperanza Diaz, the former wrestler who's now a full partner in MB SportsReps, supplies wisdom as well as glamour. But the heart of the novel is, as always, the fallible but infinitely appealing, accessible figure of Myron Bolitar--a modern Don Quixote complete with knee brace and cell phone, ready to take on the world's problems. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Darkest Fear (2000)

Coben, Harlan - Myron 07

Darkest Fear (2000)

Myron 07

Harlan Coben

"What is your darkest fear?" the voice whispers. Close your eyes now and picture it. Can you see it? Do you have it yet? The very worst agony you can imagine?"

After a long pause, I say, "Yes."

"Good. Now imagine something worse, something far, far worse..."

--"The Mind of Terror" by Stan Gibbs,

column in the New York Herald,

January 16

Chapter 1.

An hour before his world exploded like a ripe tomato under a stiletto heel, Myron bit into a fresh pastry that tasted suspiciously like a urinal cake.

"Well?" Mom prompted.

Myron battled his throat, won a costly victory, swallowed. "Not bad."

Mom shook her head, disappointed.

"What?"

"I'm a lawyer," Mom said. "You'd think I'd have raised a better liar."

"You did the best you could," Myron said.

She shrugged and waved a hand at the, uh, pastry. "It's my first time baking, bubbe. It's okay to tell me the truth."

"It's like biting into a urinal cake," Myron said.

"A what?"

"In men's public bathrooms. In the urinals. They put them there for the smell or something."

"And you eat them?"

"No--"

"Is that why your father takes so long in there? He's having a little Tastykake? And here I thought his prostate was acting up."

"I'm joking, Mom."

She smiled through blue eyes tinged with a red that Visine could never hope to get out, the red you can only get through slow, steady tears. Normally Mom was heavily into histrionics. Slow, steady tears were not her style. "So am I, Mr. Smarty Pants. You think you're the only one in this family with a sense of humor?"

Myron said nothing. He looked down at the, uh, pastry, fearing or perhaps hoping it might crawl away. In the thirty-plus years his mother had lived in this house, she had never baked--not from a recipe, not from scratch, not even from one of those Pillsbury morning croissant thingies that came in small mailing tubes. She could barely boil water without strict instructions and pretty much never cooked, though she could whip up a mean Celeste frozen pizza in the microwave, her agile fingers dancing across the numerical keypad in the vein of Nureyev at Lincoln Center. No, in the Bolitar household, the kitchen was more a gathering place--a Family Room Lite, if you will--than anything related to even the basest of the culinary arts. The round table held magazines and catalogs and congealing white boxes of Chinese takeout. The stovetop saw less action than a Merchant-Ivory production. The oven was a prop, strictly for show, like a politician's Bible.

Something was definitely amiss.

They were sitting in the living room with the dated pseudo-leather white modular couch and aqua-tinged rug whose shagginess reminded Myron of a toilet-seat cover. Grown-up Greg Brady. Myron kept stealing glances out the picture window at the For Sale sign in the front yard as though it were a spaceship that had just landed and something sinister was about to step out.

"Where's Dad?"

Mom gave a weary wave toward the door. "He's in the basement."

"In my room?"

"Your old room, yes. You moved out, remember?"

He did--at the tender age of thirty-four no less. Childcare experts would salivate and tsk-tsk over that one--the prodigal son choosing to remain in his split-level cocoon long after the deemed appropriate deadline for the butterfly to break free. But Myron might argue the opposite. He might bring up the fact that for generations and in most cultures, offspring lived in the familial home until a ripe old age, that adopting such a philosophy could indeed be a societal boom, helping people stay rooted to something tangible in this era of the disintegrating nuclear family. Or, if that rationale didn't float your boat, Myron could try another. He had a million.

But the truth of the matter was far simpler: He liked hanging out in the burbs with Mom and Dad--even if confessing such a sentiment was about as hip as an Air Supply eight track.

"So what's going on?" he asked.

"Your father doesn't know you're here yet," she said. "He thinks you're not coming for another hour."

Myron nodded, puzzled. "What's he doing in the basement?"

"He bought a computer. Your father plays with it down there."

"Dad?"

"My point exactly. The man can't change a lightbulb without a manual--all of a sudden he's Bill Gates. Always on the nest."

"The Net," Myron corrected.

"The what?"

"It's called the Net, Mom."

"I thought it was nest. The bird's nest or something."

"No, it's Net."

"Are you sure? I know there's a bird in there somewhere."

"The Web maybe," Myron tried. "Like with a spider."

She snapped her fingers. "That's it. Anyway your father is on there all the time, weaving the Web or whatever. He chats with people, Myron. That's what he tells me. He chats with complete strangers. Like he used to do with the CB radio, remember?"

Myron remembered. Circa 1976. Jewish Dads in the suburbs checking for "smokeys" on the way to the delicatessen. Mighty convoy of Cadillac Sevilles. Ten-four, good buddy.

"And that's not all," she went on. "He's typing his memoirs. A man who can't scribble down a grocery list without consulting Strunk and White suddenly thinks he's an ex-president."

They were selling the house. Myron still could not believe it. His eyes wandered about the overly familiar surroundings, his gaze getting snagged on the photographs running up the stairwell. He saw his family mature via fashion--the skirts and sideburns lengthening and shortening, the quasi-hippie fringes and suede and tie-dyes, the leisure suits and bell-bottoms, the frilly tuxedos that would be too tacky for a Vegas casino-- the years flying by frame by frame like one of those depressing life insurance commercials. He spotted the poses from his basketball days--a sixth-grade suburban-league foul shot, an eighth-grade drive to the hoop, a high school slam dunk--the row ending with Sports Illustrated cover shots, two from his days at Duke and one with his leg in a cast and a large-fonted IS HE FINISHED? emblazoned across his knee-cast image (the answer in the mind's eye being an equally large-fonted YES!).

"So what's wrong?" he asked.

"I didn't say anything was wrong."

Myron shook his head, disappointed. "And you a lawyer."

"Setting a bad example?"

"It's no wonder I never ran for higher office."

She folded her hands on her lap. "We need to chat."

Myron didn't like the tone.

"But not here," she added. "Let's take a walk around the block."

Myron nodded and they rose. Before they reached the door, his cell phone rang. Myron snatched it up with a speed that would have made Wyatt Earp step back. He put the phone to his ear and cleared his throat.

"MB SportsReps," he said, silky-smooth, professionallike. "This is Myron Bolitar speaking."

"Nice phone voice," Esperanza said. "You sound like Billy Dee ordering two Colt 45s."

Esperanza Diaz was his longtime assistant and now sports-agent partner at MB SportsReps (M for Myron, the B for Bolitar--for those keeping score).

"I was hoping you were Lamar," he said.

"He hasn't called yet?"

"Nope."

He could almost see Esperanza frown. "We're in deep doo-doo here," she said.

"We're not in deep doo-doo. We're just sucking a little wind, that's all."

"Sucking a little wind," Esperanza repeated. "Like Pavarotti running the Boston Marathon."

"Good one," Myron said.

"Thanks."

Lamar Richardson was a power-hitting Golden Glove shortstop who'd just become a free agent--"free agent" being a phrase agents whisper in the same way a mufti might whisper "Praise Allah." Lamar was shopping for new representation and had whittled his final list down to three agencies: two supersized conglomerates with enough office space to house a Price Club and the aforementioned pimple-on-the-buttocks but oh-so-personal MB SportsReps. Go, pimple-butt!

Myron watched his mother standing by the door. He switched ears and said, "Anything else?"

"You'll never guess who called," Esperanza said.

"Elle and Claudia demanding another menage a trois?"

"Oooo, close."

She would never just tell him. With his friends, everything was a TV game show. "How about a hint?" he said.

"One of your ex-lovers."

He felt a jolt. "Jessica."

Esperanza made a buzzing noise. "Sorry, wrong bitch."

Myron was puzzled. He'd only had two long-term relationships in his life: Jessica on and off for the past thirteen years (now very off). And before that, well, you'd have to go back to...

"Emily Downing?"

Esperanza made a ding-ding noise.

A sudden image pierced his heart like a straight-blade. He saw Emily sitting on that threadbare couch in the frat basement, smiling that smile at him, her legs bent and tucked under her, wearing his high school varsity jacket that was several sizes too big, her gesturing hands slipping down and disappearing into the sleeves.

His mouth went dry. "What did she want?"

"Don't know. But she said that she simply had to talk to you. She's very breathy, you know. Like everything she says is a double entendre."

With Emily, everything was.

"She good in the sack?" Esperanza asked.

Being an overly attractive bisexual, Esperanza viewed everyone as a potential sex partner. Myron wondered what that must be like, to have and thus weigh so many options, and then he decided to leave that road untraveled. Wise man.