Six Years

I have been a Coben fan for a long time. I started out with the Bolitar series and moved on to the stand-alones. I have thoroughly enjoyed each book. However, this one gave me the urge to reach through my Kindle and slap Jake across the face and say "Snap out of it!'. The book is based on a man's obsession of a woman he briefly knew. In order to find her , he puts others in danger, is suspended from his job, all the while thinking only of finding Natalie. This reads like a Nicholas Sparks book gone bad.

Nope. Doesn't work. Too many moving parts. Too many characters. Too many bodies, buried and bleeding from the pages. Too many bad people - vicious, sadistic, really evil. Too many coincidences, miraculous escapes. All told in smart witty first person prose. Gets boring after a while. You really have to work at it to stay with it to the end. Lot's of imagination from the writer. He's good. but just wish he could have done a better job with this one.

Imagine that you fell deeply, truly in love, but lost them to someone else. Years later you try to reconnect, only to find that nobody seems to know who she was.

It's a story concept worthy of Hitchcock, maybe with a dash of Kafka. Harlen Coben spins up a pretty effective thriller in the standalone "Six Years," where the hero fights against a terrifying wall of secrets, lies and murder... and the only problems are that the ending isn't really conclusive, and the main character seems selfish in his relentless quest.

Six years ago, Jake Fisher fell passionately in love with Natalie Avery. But suddenly she dumped him, married an old boyfriend named Todd and forced him to promise to leave "us" alone. And for six years, he kept the promise.

Now Jake learns that Todd has just died, and goes to his funeral in hopes of getting closure with Natalie... only to see his wife of TWENTY years is definitely not her. Baffled and worried, Jake starts searching for his onetime lover, and discovers that not only does the artists' retreat where they met not exist, but no one will admit to knowing anything about Natalie.

Well, until the hit men show up and try to kill him, demanding to know where Natalie is. Soon Jake has been suspended from his job and is being followed by the increasingly suspicious police -- which only spurs him further into his quest. But he soon discovers that uncovering the truth could be deadly to more than just himself -- it could destroy Natalie and several other people as well.

"Six Years" gripped me like a vise for most its length. Coben's writing is smooth and workmanlike -- not particularly detailed or atmospheric, but with some clever turns of phrase and some fairly exciting action scenes (a hit man's shattering neck sounds like "wet paper-mache"). And he has a rare knack for spinning up a sense of thick, foggy suspense, building up plot twists and murky secrets that are layered over each other.

And he weaves that plot together well. The assorted clues quietly fall into place one by one, bringing together mobsters, hit men and the ugly secrets of academia into one big sordid mass. In this, I must tip my hat to Mr. Coben...

... but then in all falls apart in the last few chapters. When a pesky supporting character is brutally gunned down, I started to have the nagging suspicion that Coben had run out of story to tell before he had wrapped the plot threads up. The whole REASON Natalie is on the run is left hanging, unresolved and unsatisfying, at the book's end -- nothing has actually been fixed or dealt with except the "relationship issues." It feels like Coben is keeping his options open for a bad sequel to handle everything he DIDN'T cap off here.

Jake starts off as a fairly ordinary protagonist with a thick romantic streak, and at first you feel sorry for him about "the one that got away." But that sympathy starts to trickle away when he refuses to stop looking for Natalie, even though he's repeatedly told that his quest may either get her killed or cause her to kill HERSELF. He just refuses to believe that things could turn out badly for her, or that he has any kind of responsibility towards her.

Eventually, it feels less like he loves her truly and more like he wants to PROVE that he was her one bestest truest luv. It seems less like love than obsession, and his constant nattering about the brief time they were involved becomes tiresome.

And like Rebecca, Natalie is a nebulously lovely figure that can only be pieced together like a puzzle. When she DOES show up, we don't really get any answers about how she got there, why, or where she's been. Nothing.

"Six Years" grinds along nicely for most of its length, but the hard-won mystery is never concluded, and the hero's blind doggedness becomes an irritant. This standalone shows Coben's skill, but he sells himself short where he's strongest.

Jake Fisher fell in love with Natalie six years ago when each was attending a retreat. The affair was short, and was ended when Natalie told Jake she was marrying another man (Todd, an old boyfriend for whom she still had feelings) and asked Jake not to interfere in her new life. For six years, Jake has honored her request, but has continued to love Natalie with the kind of devotion that only a Coben fan or a Knight of the Round Table could relate to. Jake learns that Natalie's husband has died, and decides to attend the funeral, supposedly just to check in on the lost love of his life. Imagine his surprise when he learns that Todd's wife is not Natalie at all, but another woman to whom he has been married for twenty years. Jake determines to get to the bottom of the mystery. It's an intriguing premise, but from there, the story goes very wrong.

The driver of all the action in this book is Jake's undying devotion to Natalie, and while Coben routinely employs protagonists who carry their feelings for unattainable women on their sleeves, when that devotion takes over the character's life, that devotion makes him more creepy than likable. Add to that that much of the action in Six Years is unbelievable (Jake kills a man that attacks him, then attends the funeral for clues after the police identify him for Jake) and you have a very unsatisfying book. Harlan Coben is a good writer, but I frankly couldn't tell whether he was writing a love story with thriller aspects or a thriller with a love angle. Either way, this book doesn't work for me.

It's clear the author just gave up all effort in this book just so he could have 'another work' out there already. It's rushed, the dialogue is boring and not witty as it tries so hard to be, the characters are cliche and unoriginal, and to make things worse, the whole book reads like it's written by a dad trying to sound 'hip' and 'cool' to his teenaged children. I'm a college student right now and I'll tell you one thing: we don't EVER say "Yo, Prof, how's it hanging?", or "What's up, Teach?". Nearly every student--and even the professors!--sound like this. What era does he think he's writing in? Apparently not anytime after the 1990s. I don't think the author is terrible at what he does, but he's certainly gotten lazy with story-telling in this book. It's as if, after over 20 novels, he just doesn't care anymore. It's not worth the time to read and definitely not worth the money. There are better mysteries out there, and there are better romances--not to mention better romance-mysteries. Just flat out lazy.

I could not believe how disappointed I was in this work. The book was boring,stylistically repetitive and even trite and mudane in places. I found the plot implausible, full of hyperbolic rhetoric and with a hero against whom I was actively rooting!
At times, the writing was so hackneyed and full of cliches that I could have filled in the blanks myself. Please, no more of this type of book Mr. Coben.

I've not read Coben before but relied on the overall rating for this book which was WAY too high in my opinion. The voice immediately annoyed me, similar to Catcher in the Rye, where I'm hearing every thought and question in this guy's head. The main character is supposed to be a college professor, youngest to become head of his political science department, yet speaks and thinks like a teenager complete with cliches from the 80's. I actually checked the publishing date on this book to see if it was written 30 years ago. As the story progresses, there is no reason I want this guy to EVER find his ex-lover. He's delusional, immature, careless, and selfish..all in the name of a relationship that lasted a few months. I'm not describing a complex character development but rather an unbelievable protagonist. I would not recommend this book to anyone.

I am really mystified by all the five star reviews. I enjoyed several of Coben's previous works, but this was a dud. This book is so poorly written that I found myself wondering if Coben even wrote it. It reads like bad YA fiction or a cheap romance ("I looked back at Natalie's face, and it was as if small explosives detonated in my chest. Just boom, boom, boom."). The writing is so poor that I couldn't get beyond the first chapter. And what is with the overuse of the word 'well'? These four uses of 'well' were in the first four pages:

1. "His eyes smoothly and smugly skimmed the guests before getting snagged on, WELL, me."
2. "...the game had gone into overtime and we screamed and cheered and, WELL, how could he be dead?"
3. "I, who had never really believed in commitment and had done all I could to escape its shackles, knew right away--WELL, within a week anyway--that this was the woman to wake up to every single day."
4. "We.....met and fell hard and now that it was nearing September, WELL, all good things come to an end."

If that doesn't stop you from buying this book, then consider these quotations from chapter one:
"Gag me with a spoon, right?" (Has anyone used this phrase since the 80s?)
"Two hands reached into my chest, grabbed my brittle heart on either side, and snapped it in two."

I have read a number of Coben books, which can usually be relied upon for a great beach read-- nothing deep, but engaging mysteries with converging plot lines and unexpected twists and turns. This book just flat lined. I kept waiting for it to take off and was shocked when it ended: "What, that was IT?"

The plot is a somewhat naggingly familiar cliche: Guy meets the love of his life, loses her to another guy and is told never to contact her again. ( Yawn.) Six years later, our hero reads the obituary of his lost love's husband and decides to get in touch with her. Surprise, surprise, no trace of her can be found. Determined, our hero presses on, in the face of a multitude of warnings that he is not only putting his true love's life in danger, but that of a plethora of others, including his best friend, as well. At this point, it should be clear to anyone that the object of our hero's desire is in some sort of witness protection program. But for reasons that make no sense whatsoever, except to push the flimsy plot along, our hero perseveres. In a very pale imitation of many of Coben's previous books, there is one very slight twist at the end.

I have no idea why this book is so hot right now, except to think that Coben's previous successes boosted this lackluster read to the top of a pallid bestseller list.

The thing about SIX YEARS is that if you've read a lot of Harlan Coben books, you will recognize the lack of fresh characters, the same wit, the similar plot twists, and the overall unoriginality of the novel. But, if you haven't read much of Coben, you may love this novel. You'll love it, because all of the trademark Coben plotting, characterization, and humor is in this novel, just as it was when I fell in love with the author.

I enjoyed the novel, but it just didn't thrill me like some of his other stand-alones. Six years ago, Jake Fisher had a whirlwind romance with Natalie. Then, suddenly, Natalie agreed to marry her ex-boyfriend, got married, and told Jake to leave her alone. Jake kept his promise, but when Jake sees an obituary for Natalie's husband, Jake goes to the funeral and discovers that Natalie's husband wasn't married to Natalie, and no one even knew who Natalie was.

That is the simple setup. Where is Natalie now? What happened six years ago. The plot of the novel is part of the problem. Jake has never moved on from Natalie, and the entire novel is about finding her. Yet, we never meet her, and never learn to care about her. Coben never forces me to care about Natalie other than through Jake's obsession. Even as the plot moves along, I found I really didn't care what Natalie had done.

Coben is one of my favorites, but this isn't one of his better novels. The plot is really just one long race to the whereabouts of Natalie, with only minor diversions in between. Jake Fisher might as well be called Harlan Coben, with the tall frame and the shaved head. Also, it seemed like on every other page, Jake was stunned and his heart stopped at a new truth he uncovered. It got kind of old, since everything he kept finding out was just a small piece of the puzzle of what happened to Natalie.

This might be my harshest review ever of a Coben book, but I still enjoyed it. He's just done better. The plot is unique, but his writing style is the same as most other books. I enjoy the humor and the alpha male leads, but they all run together.