I’ve been aware of Harlan Coben’s series of crime/mystery novels starring a sports agent named Myron Bolitar for some time but never read one because I thought it’d be something like Jerry Maguire crossed with Murder, She Wrote. I figured Myron would always be tripping over dead baseball players killed by pitching machines or discovering the bodies of basketball players hanging from rims.

What I should have realized sooner is that modern sports can offer a great backdrop for a gritty mystery. You’ve got an industry with huge amounts of money involved with famous personalities always getting caught up in gambling scandals, dog fighting, rape accusations, domestic violence, drug abuse, manslaughter and the occasional player shooting someone else or themselves so sports is the perfect environment to set a crime novel.

Myron was once a college basketball star with Duke (Boo Duke!) before a knee injury ruined his chances for a pro career. Myron went on to get a law degree from Harvard, worked as some kind of secret undercover agent for the FBI, and now has taken up being a sports agent. One assumes that he’ll also be a cowboy and an astronaut someday, too.

Christian Steele is Myron’s biggest client. A talented, clean cut quarterback who looks to be the next Aaron Rodgers, Steele is every agent’s dream. Myron is in the midst of negotiations with a tough and unscrupulous NFL owner over Christian’s first contract when the player gets a shocking piece of mail. Christian’s girlfriend, Kathy, had disappeared a year ago from their college campus and everyone assumes the worst. Christian receives a pornographic magazine with a nude photo of Kathy in a phone sex ad.

Fearing scandal or some kind of set up that will ruin Christian’s NFL chances, Myron begins checking into the ad and what happened to Kathy. Things are complicated because Myron’s ex-girlfriend, Jessica, was Kathy’s sister, and their father was recently murdered. If that isn’t enough, Myron has to deal with another sleazy agent and his gangster pal who are trying to strong arm one of his clients into leaving Myron for them.

Fortunately, like most heroes of a crime series, Myron has a bad ass friend he can count on for help. Windsor ‘Win’ Horne Lockwood III seems like the kind of preppy who would make Niles Crane look tough, but Win is Myron’s former FBI partner and a ruthless killer when need be. Plus, he uses his financial business to advise Myron’s clients so he can get your portfolio squared away in between ass kickings.

The whole premise for this is obviously far fetched, but Corben gets it grounded enough to make the story enjoyable. Myron is a likeable smart-ass with a wry sense of humor, and Win is hilarious. I also liked how Corben built up the idea that Myron’s skills as a lawyer and former detective are also valuable as a sports agent and vice versa. In one scene, Myron deals with a brutal negotiation with the NFL owner and in another he’s working out a deal with a vicious gangster. There’s precious little difference between the two.

This book also has a big time warp element since it was written in 1995. Like Michael Connelly’s The Poet, I found some of the things like car phones and print pornography to be almost quaint now. But the biggest laugh is that Corben named the team that Christian is going to play pro football for the Titans. I assumed this meant the Tennessee Titans, but then the story describes their facilities at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. It was only then that I realized that the Tennessee Titans were still the Houston Oilers in 1995, and that Corben had invented a fictional team at the time but later that name would be used for real. It was a tad confusing for a minute.

There’s a few too many coincidence for my taste, and I could have lived without the backstory between Myron and Jessica, but overall I still enjoyed this one. The sports stuff gives it a fresh angle, but you don’t have to be a big sports fan to enjoy it. Plus, I thought Win was a great addition to the ranks of bad ass friends in crime fiction like Hawk, Mick Ballou, Bubba Rogowski, Mouse, Joe Pike, etc. I’ll be revisiting Myron’s series again sometime soon.