Profile: Harlan Coben Sleeps Well by Keeping You Up Nights

While his readers stay up nights glued to the pages of his latest adrenalin-charged thriller, Promise Me, Harlan Coben sleeps like a baby knowing that his mastery of the hook-and-twist suspense tale provides financial security for his wife and four children, writes Jay MacDonald of Bankrate.com.

He continues that in 1995 Coben published Deal Breaker, the first in his mystery series featuring Myron Bolitar, Boston Celtics basketball-star-turned-sports-agent who solves crimes with the help of a blue-blooded sociopath sidekick, Win Lockwood III, and ex-female wrestler gals Friday Esperanza and Big Cindi. Critical praise and sales grew apace as Coben became the first author to win the trifecta of mystery accolades: the Anthony (for Deal Breaker), Edgar (Fade Away) and Shamus (Drop Shot) awards.

Coben's novels peel the veneer from northern New Jersey suburbia to reveal dark truths about the human condition in millennial America, adds MacDonald. But that's all fodder for his fiction. In reality, Coben and his pediatrician wife Dr. Anne Armstrong-Coben have been happily married for two decades, and their 140-year-old Ridgewood, N.J., Victorian is alive with the comings and goings of four young children (the oldest is 12) and two dogs.

Read the entire profile of, and MacDonald's interview with, Harlan Coben on BankRate.com here.

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