Hold Tight

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The premise sounded fun, and right up my alley--a gay sailor working for Naval Intelligence tracks down Nazi spies in 1942 New York--but the plot was just too far-fetched and unbelievable for my taste. As if this isn’t enough white-knuckle action, there are a few other storylines running through this clunker. He also explores how fragile our everyday lives are--how our dedication to lives and family and children can come undone by the smallest thing--an unkind remark from a teacher, a car accident, or the fact that we resemble someone else and are mistaken for them.

These two points of view have proved irreconcilable over the years, and needless to say, my desire for continued intercourse with her has trumped my moral standings on the issue. The plot is tight-knit, involving spies, Nazis, murder, secrets -- the works; to me, it was quite the page-turner. The operation is to work out of a gay brothel in the hope of ferreting out some Nazi spies working out of New York.I've enjoyed Coben's books for years, but if I have a complaint about some of his later efforts, it lies in the fact that for some reason, he apparently feels compelled to cram one hard-to-believe twist after another into the end of his books, until the reader (or at least this reader) can no longer suspend disbelief. Contrived details (a hulking bouncer for a rough club in a black neighborhood conveniently has a green tattoo of the prestigious college he and the MC both attended.

A story filled with the life behind closed doors of four families, and how one thing said can sent the whole ball running and cause a chain effect of events and deaths.A few hours later my friend answered her door to a policeman informing her that the daughter had died in a car accident. What did you think of the author’s storytelling style, how he employs different voices in the narrative and uses flashbacks and foreshadowing? One of the most difficult aspects of the novel -- Bram handles it with aplomb -- is the '40s attitude toward racial differences. Hank is placed undercover in a gay brothel with the hopes that some of his clients will be spies, and thus the government can apprehend them and their contacts. Edgar Hoover chapters 12 to 15 give more detailed background insight into the thinking of the FBI following Pearl Harbour and spies.

However, there were several points where I was taken right out of the story, which is not good for any author who wants to sell future works.

He now lives in New Jersey with his wife, Anne Armstrong-Coben MD, a pediatrician, and their four children. So then we had to get more vigilant about checking for electronics which naturally was not a welcomed activity by the teen. While the last does somewhat flesh out Tia’s character, the storyline itself is a failure from the start, as I wasn’t expecting the wife of a transplant surgeon to be hard up enough for employment to completely disregard her family in dire straits.