During the last decade or so, publishers of American style fiction have borrowed a web page from Hollywood’s playbook by primarily packaging novels like movies, grafting collectively collaborators from two completely different A-lists: people who characteristic bestselling novelists and main celebrities. Giant business rewards have been reaped from these crossbred literary partnerships. Invoice and Hillary Clinton, to call simply two examples, have each loved bestsellers with big-time writing companions James Patterson and Louise Penny, respectively.
Now we’ve Reese Witherspoon, already a serious pressure in American publishing, teaming up with Harlan Coben, one of many world’s largest promoting thriller writers, to create “Gone Before Goodbye,” a e book that faucets into our fascination with the follies of the impossibly wealthy on the similar time that it ponders actual questions concerning the ethics of social engineering by way of medical advances in organ regeneration.
Now, it should be stated that e book critics are cynical snobs by nature, and one thing like “Gone Before Goodbye,” which at first blush appears to have been a mission drummed up in a expertise company convention room, is susceptible to be acquired with a derisory scoff and a stiff-armed shove from those that are simply ready to sink their enamel into the brand new Thomas Pynchon novel. However that is Harlan Coben and Reese Witherspoon we’re speaking about right here, two formidable abilities whose observe document for delivering good leisure is unimpeachable. “Gone Before Goodbye” isn’t some magpie creature patched collectively from shopworn thriller tropes, even when sure plot components really feel a bit a lot. As a substitute, what the 2 authors have delivered is a narrative that pulls the reader deep right into a rarefied world the place ethics are mere technicalities and the wants of the wealthy take priority over petty trivia like, say, morality.
The e book’s protagonist, Maggie McCabe, a superb Military fight surgeon who, alongside along with her husband, Marc, and their buddy Hint, teamed up after faculty to create WorldCures Alliance, “one of the world’s most dynamic charities, specializing in providing medical services for the most impoverished,” working as subject surgeons risking their lives on the entrance traces in Afghanistan and the Center East. The trio as soon as had massive plans centered on the prototype of a synthetic coronary heart they designed, THUMPR7, which they have been satisfied would change the world by extending the lives of tens of millions, wealthy, poor or in any other case.
When the e book begins, these plans have been torn asunder: Marc, because it transpires, has been killed in a insurgent assault on a refugee camp in Libya. Hint has gone lacking together with the bogus coronary heart prototype. And Maggie has misplaced her medical license resulting from a hiccup of dangerous judgment on her half. At unfastened ends and broke, Maggie, and the reader, are then swept into a wierd journey when a profitable beauty surgeon named Evan Barlow approaches her with a proposal to wipe out her household’s money owed in trade for Maggie committing to carry out surgical procedure for a consumer in Russia who’s prepared to pay her tens of millions.
Off Maggie goes into the soiled world of the Russian oligarchy, in a metropolis known as Rublevka, “perhaps the wealthiest residential area in the world,” the place a shady creep named Oleg Ragoravich, one of many 10 wealthiest and most reclusive Russian billionaires, has a job for her. It’s properly beneath Maggie’s pay grade: Oleg desires augmentation mammoplasty for his mistress Nadia. Ragoravich is predictably oleaginous, a person with a file cupboard filled with hidden agendas, however he’s charmingly persuasive, and the cash has already been wired into Maggie’s account. She is in earlier than she even has an opportunity to again out.
Naturally, there’s a nice deal extra concerned than a easy boob job. With out giving an excessive amount of away, Witherspoon and Coben on this novel have tapped into the rich’s obsession with utilizing know-how to foster super-agers. Because the stakes get greater, the plot ripples out into bigger and bigger concentric circles that envelop Maggie’s life and everybody in it. However there’s a lot to absorb whereas this occurs, a lot voyeuristic pleasure available as Maggie acclimates into an virtually impossibly lush and lavish world that toggles between Russia and Dubai, the de facto playground for raffish oligarchs intent on dangerous habits.
Witherspoon and Coben revel within the particulars. The airplane that spirits Maggie from New York to Russia is a “full-size 180-seat Airbus A320 renovated for private use,” kitted out with a 65-inch contoured TV, a gourmand kitchen and a marble ensuite rest room with an “oversize rain showerhead.” Ragoravich’s dacha is a “garish and almost grotesque” palace clad in marble that makes Maggie consider Versailles, however in a method that makes Versailles appear dumpy. Every little thing inside is “not so much an attempt to classily suggest opulence and power as to batter you with it.” That is the form of thriller that invitations you right into a gilded empyrean that compels you and repels you in equal measure.
The e book’s plot mechanics hum together with nice tempo and verve, even when a number of of its particulars are too far-fetched to swallow. With “Gone Before Goodbye,” the 2 authors ship a enjoyable trip right into a shadow land the place the wealthy are satisfied that cash can insulate them from all the pieces, together with their very own mortality — even when they need to homicide a number of folks to get there.
Weingarten is the creator of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”
