The decline of the whodunit can be directly correlated to Harlan Coben’s popularity.
Can we infer a Coben Method? If Stay Close is our guide, it is: character enslaved to plot twist. Cassie Morris has no reason to leave the man she loves and change her identity to start a new life: she sees her stalker’s corpse just as she was planning to run. But Coben needs to manufacture suspense from a false revelation that the man might still be alive (14 years later). Cassie is therefore required to witness her stalker’s death. Yet she still must change her identity, because Coben’s mechanism demands shocking revelations of a hidden past. We need the jilted lover, and new love, the kids to get suspicious, etc. She is locked into an impossible history.
The rationale for all this (I guess) is that we have seen it all from the whodunit. Agatha Christie laid bare the common mechanisms. Ever-crazier contortions are needed to keep us from guessing the villain.
But other writers like Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) have shown us that wild plot twists can actually deepen and improve characterization, while avoiding the sort of blatant contradictions which abound in Stay Close.
Having planted the flag for plot twist uber alles, the Coben Method now rewards us with marionette characters like: a pair of comic book psychotics, hired as private detectives to find a missing person, their method consisting of torturing and murdering everyone they come across, sowing red herrings with wild abandon. But they came highly recommended!
Then we have detective Michael Broome (James Nesbitt), who will fall in love with (and remain loyal to!) the serial killer villain in order to further confound our guesses over the third act. His girlfriend killed like 15 people. She is psychotic. He’s a police detective. I can’t imagine this guy is one of Coben’s recurring characters. Does he fall in love with the killer every novel?’
Broome is such a void that viewers may be forgiven for wistfully confusing him with Harry Bosch. Armitage looks remarkably similar to Titus Welliver, who played Bosch in the compelling Amazon series. You be the judge (pictures chosen at random):
Sadly, every time Armitage speaks in Stay Close is a rude reminder that this is not Bosch, and Harlan Coben is no Michael Connelly.