Power player

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/05/2021 (1623 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Windsor Horne Lockwood III is a world-class jerk, knows it, doesn’t care.

Win is a violent, vain man, flitting among mansions and posh towers by helicopter, a much richer version of Bruce Wayne who’s so ultra-wealthy that he’s presumably above the law and most assuredly better than any of the rest of us.

He’s also the first-person narrator in an absolutely humdinger of a murder mystery from perpetual bestseller Harlan Coben, author of 31 novels, including such adapted-for-TV blockbusters as The Woods and The Stranger.

The plot kicks into high gear when the stench from an exclusive Manhattan penthouse leads police to discover an unidentified murder victim, a hoarder with the means to live off the grid in fabulous luxury, and who has a Vermeer that was stolen from the Lockwood family decades ago.

No sign of the Picasso, also stolen in the same art heist, alas.

But there are clues linking the theft of the stereotypically priceless paintings to a vicious home invasion, in which Win’s uncle was killed and his cousin kidnapped. She was raped and tortured, but was the only young woman able to escape alive; the FBI believes at least nine other young women kidnapped over the years by the same monsters were eventually murdered.

There are hints that Win has had some positive but mysterious dealings — in a mystery, you’d hope they’d be mysterious, wouldn’t you? — with the FBI in the past, and he’s friends with one of those shadowy government figures who knows all and doesn’t appear in a budget line anywhere.

You’re not going to get too many plot revelations here. Let’s just say that somehow the story involves an antiwar demonstration gone horribly wrong the better part of 50 years ago.

For younger readers born after history was rewritten, that was back when much of the United States turned against an illegal war the country waged in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and turned against the drafting of largely impoverished young men, visible minorities whose families didn’t have the clout to keep their sons out of the war.

Back then, half a dozen young radicals whose supposed-to-be-peaceful protest killed innocent bystanders have never been seen again. Suffice to say that not only is Win looking for these now-senior fugitives, but so is an unforgiving Mob family whose don lost his niece when things went wrong back in the day.

Windsor Horne Lockwood III is the best friend of Myron Bolitar, the protagonist in many of Coben’s novels — Win’s a secondary character now getting his own book.

There are snippets here and there implying maybe all of Win’s wealth isn’t inherited, that he’s independently wealthy through some sort of business empire of his own.

We first meet Win sitting courtside in Celebrity Row at the final game of the March Madness college basketball tournament. Afterwards, he lures an assistant coach of one team to a deserted warehouse, a massive man whom Win then beats with his bare hands into a life-altering pile of pain. It eventually gets explained.

He’s a complex man, is Win, and while he is supremely confident that his wealth makes him the smartest person in the room, he isn’t. He makes mistakes. The person who’s smarter? Read on.

Coben occasionally gives us a nudge and a wink. Maybe there’s a human inside Win… maybe.

You don’t have to like Windsor Horne Lockwood III to have a dandy time reading Win the outstanding book. Spoiler alert — Win the person doesn’t give a hoot.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin understands that the rich rule the world and that he is but a lowly proletarian drone. He wouldn’t like Windsor Horne Lockwood III, but Win wouldn’t even notice. Or care.