Spoilers!
What has always made me gravitate toward Harlan Coben’s (standalone) books is that fun factor of shit-hitting-the-fan for a normal person. In his first Windsor ‘Win’ Horne Lockwood III book, released in 2021, aptly titled, Win, Coben turns this aspect on its head. What if, instead, the main protagonist far from a normal person — he’s basically Batman, as Coben makes a joke about (Win, in fact, is obsessed with the Adam West version of Batman). Win is rich, well-trained in every kind of martial arts, and willing to doll out vigilante justice as he sees fit. Which, small note on the Batman point: Yes, it’s fun to joke that Batman’s superpower is his richness enabling everything he wants to do. While partly true, Batman’s true superpower is his drive for justice, unyielding and unmatched. But I digress. Win is also semi-sociopathic in how he doesn’t feel much and if he needs to “feel” in order to elicit information, he tries to mimic the emotion. Still, you grow to like him because he’s wielding all his Super Rich Guy, violence-enjoying vigilantism out on the bad people. Win is the second series Coben has spun out of his popular Myron Bolitar detective series. Win was always the Watson to Myron’s Sherlock.
The Lockwoods, like many old money rich families, care about their reputation, and like vultures, circle the wagons to maintain that reputation. Even if that means protecting a violent pedophile. Which is what they ultimately did with Win’s Uncle Aldrich. He liked young girls, preyed upon them, raped them, and it seems may have even killed them. The family, knowing all this, just kept moving him around, hiding his “predilections” as Win’s grandpa called it. Their justification was the aforementioned reputation and the rationale was that it was the 1960s and 1970s, it was a “different time.” Ew. That’s the worst of it. The problematic veneer on top was that, Uncle Aldrich was also one of the unknown members of the Jane Street Six, one of the many underground factions in the 1960s and 1970s that carried out terroristic bombings and crimes. In this case, the members of the Jane Street Six, led by Ry Strauss, planned to use Molotov cocktails to bomb a USO building to show opposition to the Vietnam War. Ostensibly, they planned to bomb the building when nobody was inside. The action went haywire though when one of the Molotov cocktails nearly hit a bus, which caused the bus to veer off the road killing many onboard. All the Jane Street Six went into hiding thereafter. Two of the family members of the victims wanted vengeance: first, the family that was connected to the mob, so, duh, and second, a petite mother, Vanessa, who proclaimed to be devout and forgiving of the culprits. That was to mask her rage and vengeance; her own brand of vigilante justice to come.
Meanwhile, Patricia Lockwood, Win’s cousin, has quite the story herself. The story, as its known by Win and the wider public: Uncle Aldrich was murdered in front of her, and then she was abducted and raped for five months before managing to break free and escape. She wasn’t the only one that had been take to the “Hut of Horrors” to be raped and brutalized. Later, she set up a charity aimed at helping girls just like her. The real story is something a bit different, but the throughline remains the same: vigilante justice. As it turns out, Patricia and Ry were close because Ry and Aldrich were close as members of the Jane Street Six. Patricia and Ry concocted a plan to steal the prized Lockwood (her own family!) paintings from a nearby college. After doing so, Patricia found images concealed in the backs of the prized paintings that revealed her dad’s actions at the “Hut of Horrors.” When she confronted him, he turned violent, so, she shot and killed him. In other words, she made up the whole abduction and rape story. Instead, once again, the Lockwood family circled the wagons and helped her cover it up.
As for Ry, he’s killed at the beginning of the book in his NYC apartment (paid for by Aldrich to keep Ry quiet about his “predilections”), where he was a paranoid hoarder. It was Vanessa, the mother of one of the victims all those years ago, in her 80s now, still with rage beating through her old heart. The rest of the Jane Street Six crew were less culpable: none of them wanted to actually firebomb a USO building. They thought it was going to be red paint to symbolize the blood on the American government’s hands from Vietnam. Even so, Vanessa, after she made her religious note of forgiveness shortly after the bus crash, killed one of the Jane Street Six who came to her home when he saw her forgiveness on TV to receive her forgiveness in person. Instead, she assaults him, tortures him with the help of the aforementioned mob family, and gets the whereabouts of his fiancée, who is also one of the members of the Jane Street Six, and they kill her, too. The mob family took care of another one of the Jane Street Six around that time as well. With Ry dead (and Aldrich, for that matter), that leaves two of the Jane Street Six left. One came forward a couple years after the incident and it seems like the mob family and Vanessa left her alone. That leaves Arlo Sugarman, the supposed co-conspirator of the attempted firebombing. He also is wanted for killing a FBI agent back then, who tried to arrest him (or capture him for the mob?). He’s the only one, then, who has never been accounted for since that slaying. It turns out, Arlo was also secretly gay and has been essentially in hiding for that (and that) for 40-some years. Even so, he’s seemingly also tried to make amends for even his tangential role in what happened, as well as his self-defense (if you look at it that way) shooting of the FBI agent. Win doesn’t plan to out him to the mob or Vanessa, and in fact, turns Vanessa into the FBI because he feels her vigilantism went too far, was too sadistic and unforgiving.
Win is one of the best Coben books I’ve read. Again, I was skeptical at first because I wasn’t sure how I’d feel reading a book from the perspective of a Super Rich Guy who is a semi-sociopath, but then when he made the Batman connection, it clicked in and I was all for it. It helped, too, that Coben weaved such an interesting story with compelling characters. I also liked how Win approached the case: literally going down the line from witness to witness, sometimes doubling back when necessary, until he uncovered the full truth of everything related to his family and otherwise. It was clever and flowed exquisitely well. I hope Coben writes another Win book soon!
Milam's Musings 