Determined to keep his friends' children safe, Myron Bolitar makes two neighborhood girls promise to call him if they are ever in a bind. Several nights later, a call comes in at two o'clock a.m. The next day, a girl is missing, and Myron is the last person who saw her. And now, he must race to find her, before she is gone forever...
From Publishers Weekly
After a six-year hiatus, it's good to herald the return of Myron Bolitar, the former Boston Celtics basketball star who became a sports agent and crime solver in Coben's sprightly, exciting series. Even better, it's great fun to hear Coben himself performing this excellent audio version. As a reader, Coben has a quality best summed up by the Yiddish word hamishe (homelike, in its weaker translation). He may not be Laurence Olivier, but he sure knows how to make believers of his listeners. When Bolitar talks about going back to live with his parents in New Jersey, Coben catches the basic boyishness of his aging hero and the impact such a move has on Myron's love life. Of course, the world has gotten a lot more complicated: Bolitar's ladyfriend lost her husband on September 11. When he offers to help her teenage daughter, he quickly finds himself involved in some very dangerous adventures. With fading sports stars behaving badly in real life, it's a great pleasure to see that Bolitar has found ways to survive honorably.
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From Booklist
Starred Review Coben, the reigning master of clockwork suspense, and winner of the trifecta of mystery-writing honors--the Edgar, the Agatha, and the Shamus--produces a fascinating hybrid thriller here. Coben began his career writing detective novels starring Myron Bolitar, an ex-Celtics basketball player turned entertainment agent. For the past six years, he has concentrated on stand-alone thrillers. Coben's novels are noted for their use of technology, both as weapons used against the innocent and as ways for victims to escape their tormentors, usually with a clock ticking ominously in the background. In Promise Me, Coben skillfully grafts this deadline suspense onto the career of his series hero, Bolitar. As in his stand-alones, the novel starts with a purely domestic situation--at a party in his home, attended by friends and their offspring, Bolitar overhears two teen girls talking about driving home drunk from parties. Stung by his own memory of a high-school friend who died in a car crash, Bolitar makes the girls promise to contact him if they ever need a lift or are in trouble. The call does come a few nights later. Myron drives the caller to a friend's house, but she ends up disappearing, and guilt-ridden Myron must use all his resources to try to find what happened. Coben's resurrection of Bolitar works superbly: the melding of high suspense and high technology with a somewhat battered, very canny, questing hero is sure to produce another major hit for the way-hot Coben. Connie Fletcher
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