Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben can’t keep still, said Elizabeth Harris in The New York Times. An author with 75 million copies of books in print could probably afford to slow down, but Coben, 59, continues to crank out at least one best-selling thriller a year. He might fill the pages almost anywhere: For 2015’s The Stranger, he took Ubers constantly because he wrote well while riding in the backseat. He produced most of another recent novel in a supermarket at a seating area near the deli counter. “I came home smelling like olive loaf,” he says. He seems almost afraid of what might happen if he slackened his pace. “I finish a book and I’m like, ‘I’m an empty vessel, I’m a boxer who has thrown his last punch,’” he says. “All that insecurity goes on and on and on. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away.”

In Win, Coben’s latest No. 1 best-seller, a sidekick from 11 previous novels assumes the role of antihero, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times (U.K.). Windsor Horne Lockwood III, a patrician who dabbles in violent vigilantism, is questioned by FBI agents after a Vermeer painting that was stolen from the family years earlier is discovered in the apartment of a murder victim. As Win works to unravel the twisting mystery himself, he breaks more than a few rules and tests readers’ sympathy, which might seem odd for a character based on Coben’s best friend—a onetime roommate at Amherst College. But that’s the price any person pays for spending time with Coben. “Whatever I’m doing,” he says, “I’m making it into a story.” He won’t reveal the name of his friend, but says, “People at his golf club know he’s Win.”