Over the past decade or so, publishers of American style fiction have borrowed a web page from Hollywood’s playbook by basically packaging novels like movies, grafting collectively collaborators from two totally different A-lists: people who function bestselling novelists and main celebrities. Massive 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 now have Reese Witherspoon, already a significant pressure in American publishing, teaming up with Harlan Coben, one of many world’s largest promoting thriller writers, to create “Gone Earlier than 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 mentioned that e book critics are cynical snobs by nature, and one thing like “Gone Earlier than Goodbye,” which at first blush appears to have been a undertaking drummed up in a expertise company convention room, is susceptible to be obtained with a derisory scoff and a stiff-armed shove from those that are simply ready to sink their tooth 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 monitor report for delivering sensible leisure is unimpeachable. “Gone Earlier than Goodbye” shouldn’t be 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 minutiae like, say, morality.
The e book’s protagonist, Maggie McCabe, a superb Military fight surgeon who, alongside along with her husband, Marc, and their pal Hint, teamed up after school to create WorldCures Alliance, “one of many world’s most dynamic charities, specializing in offering medical providers for probably the most impoverished,” working as area surgeons risking their lives on the entrance traces in Afghanistan and the Center East. The trio as soon as had huge 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 substitute coronary heart prototype. And Maggie has misplaced her medical license on account of a hiccup of unhealthy judgment on her half. At free ends and broke, Maggie, and the reader, are then swept into an odd journey when a profitable beauty surgeon named Evan Barlow approaches her with a proposal to wipe out her household’s money owed in change for Maggie committing to carry out surgical procedure for a consumer in Russia who’s keen to pay her tens of millions.
Off Maggie goes into the soiled world of the Russian oligarchy, in a metropolis referred to as Rublevka, “maybe the wealthiest residential space on the planet,” 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 effectively under Maggie’s pay grade: Oleg desires augmentation mammoplasty for his mistress Nadia. Ragoravich is predictably oleaginous, a person with a file cupboard stuffed 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 expertise to foster super-agers. Because the stakes get increased, 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 nearly impossibly lush and lavish world that toggles between Russia and Dubai, the de facto playground for raffish oligarchs intent on unhealthy 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 personal use,” kitted out with a 65-inch contoured TV, a gourmand kitchen and a marble ensuite lavatory with an “oversize rain showerhead.” Ragoravich’s dacha is a “garish and nearly grotesque” palace clad in marble that makes Maggie consider Versailles, however in a means that makes Versailles appear dumpy. Every part inside is “not a lot an try to classily counsel opulence and energy as to batter you with it.” That is the type 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 Earlier than Goodbye,” the 2 authors ship a enjoyable journey right into a shadow land the place the wealthy are satisfied that cash can insulate them from every little thing, together with their very own mortality — even when they should homicide a number of folks to get there.
Weingarten is the creator of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Actual Chinatown.”
