Gone Before Goodbye
at Terri Fenelon's House
That BEAT... BEAT... BEAT... sound still echoing in your head the next morning? That's not a hangover — that's just Harlan Coben, still living rent-free in your skull. He cheerfully pulled the rug out from under us like a magician who also steals your wallet on the way out, tips his hat, and thanks you for your business.
A huge thank you to Terri Fenelon for hosting another fabulous evening. Between the festive Fourth of July spread and that warm, welcoming atmosphere of hers, it was the perfect setting for a night of wild theories, plenty of laughter, and fireworks of discussion flying every which way, with more than a few very confident "I've got it!" moments along the way — most of them wrong, all of them delivered with total conviction.
You gotta love Porkchop. Maggie's motorcycle-gang-running, everything-knowing, appears-in-any-country-within-the-hour father-in-law deserves an honorable mention all his own. The man solves geopolitical conspiracies the way the rest of us solve a grocery list, and by the end he's traded away a guy's entire organ inventory like he's running a farmers market — corneas here, a kidney there, kept the liver for a special customer. Somewhere, a Costco membership is going to waste on this man.
The Reese & Harlan Show
The months selection marked Reese Witherspoon's debut collaboration with the reigning master of the rug-pull, Harlan Coben — and by our understanding, this whole fever dream was Reese's idea, which she then brought to Harlan. So really, we can only blame her for starting it and him for making it worse. Because Harlan doesn't just write mysteries — he writes trust issues with PhDs. At one point or another, just about everyone in the room was convinced they'd cracked it. Naturally, Harlan had other plans. By the end we were all sitting there with our jaws on the floor, wondering how he fooled us so completely — again, and somehow with our full consent.
And that ending? Absolutely nobody saw it coming, which is exactly how a good Coben book likes to operate. (Except for one very intelligent member who simply refused to buy it, fiction or not — she could not picture a doctor who specializes in plastic surgery successfully performing a heart transplant. Fair point. Medicine has rules, apparently. Coben does not.)
The Verdict
The consensus was clear: this one has "movie deal written all over it" energy, and we're already lobbying for a sequel — because the real mystery of the night wasn't the ending, it was the man in the baseball cap. Was he Maggie's husband? Someone else entirely? A red herring with excellent taste in headwear? We need answers, and we need them in the movie sequel — or better yet, the series.
One thing everyone agreed on without a single dissenting vote: Reese Witherspoon and her cast of narrators delivered quite possibly the best audiobook this club has ever listened to. Her performance brought the story to life and made the whole chaotic ride even more fun.