Myron Bolitar is back, running his sports agency in New York, when two FBI agents show up on his doorstep. They are hunting for a former client of Myron’s, as his DNA was found all over a recent high-profile double murder scene.

There’s a couple of problems – Greg Downing has personal history with Myron, having married Myron’s childhood sweetheart and raising a son that Myron eventually discovered was his. Oh, and he’s been dead for three years.

As Myron and his friend Win start digging, they have no idea what they are going to uncover. Is Greg alive? Finding the answer to that is only the beginning…

A long time ago, when I wasn’t reading much crime fiction, one author that I read was Harlan Coben, specifically the Myron Bolitar series. They were books that were strong thrillers with a good strand of mystery woven through them. It’s been a good while since I’ve revisited the series – I’ve read a fair few of Coben’s standalones – and I was a bit concerned when I discovered that his latest book was a return to Myron for the first time in eight years.

There were two reasons for that concern. Firstly, as elements of the story draw on Myron’s personal history, I was concerned that I would be missing something, some emotional oomph that long-term readers would get. That isn’t the case at all – Coben gives us everything we need to know, but in a perfectly natural way. There’s nothing that feels like an exposition dump, despite the number of characters who have appeared in the series before.

My second concern was that recently we did revisit Myron’s world, if only tangentially, in Win, a story that focussed on (and was narrated by) Myron’s partner Win. That book was a magnificent piece of work, and I was worried that I’d miss Win’s distinctive voice. Thankfully, Win has a decent role in this one, and he does get to narrate a few chapters.

So, those concerns turned out to be nonsense, as I had assumed they probably would be. Let’s take a look at this book.

Wow.

It’s really hard to say much about the book’s plot without spoiling the many twists and turns, so, well, I won’t. Coben is famous for his plot twists, but here, the plot swerves all over the place in completely unexpected directions. There are a couple of points where I thought something had been overlooked or there was a plot hole, only for the fact that it have been overlooked was a crucial plot point. It’s a masterpiece of plot construction – there were moments when I thought that the plot could never be tied up satisfactorily, but you should always have faith in Harlan Coben.

The final sections of the book gave me my favourite reading experience – the dichotomy of not wanting to put the book down and also of not wanting it to finish. As Coben cranked the tension up to eleven, I was putting the book down, pacing up and down, picking it up, reading a little bit more – repeat that several times and you’ll get the idea.

All in all, as you may be able to tell, this is one of the best thrillers that I’ve read in a long time. Whether you’re up to date with Myron or you’ve never met him before, you don’t want to miss this one.

Think Twice is out on Thursday 23^rd May from Random House in hardback and ebook. Many thanks for the review e-copy.