Coincidence

Rating:
Summary: Fun but not unflawed
Review: George Daly considers himself a very lucky, happy and contented man married to the woman he loves and writing the kind of books that he enjoys. When his father dies, George goes to the nursing home to make funeral arrangements and, get rid of his father's belongings. He comes across a picture of himself between two adults he never seen before. His curiosity drives him to hire a private detective to find out if the couple's son (and George's double) is still alive.

Before the two men meet, George realizes there is something wrong with his marriage and his spouse admits that her ex-lover is back in her life and she wants a divorce. Before anything definite can be arranged Larry Hart enters the picture and changes the lives of everyone he comes in contact with.

David Ambrose has written a complex, frightening gothic-like suspense thriller that will have readers eagerly turning the pages to see what happens next. COINCIDENCE reads like an episode of "THE TWILIGHT ZONE" except that when taken as a whole, each scene seems plausible. With one exception, the characters are everyday people who make this novel greater than the sum of its parts.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Coincidence
Review: George Daly has become obsessed.

He's obsessed with the subjects of a couple of old photos and with coincidences, specifically those classified as synchronicity......and both are about to get him into trouble by colliding with one another.

The photo is of himself as a young boy.....he thinks. This boy is with a smiling couple that also appeared in an earlier photo with his parents. George has an inexplicable need to find out who those people are and why he can't remember having that picture taken.

Through a series of coincidences (which, by the way, prompt him to do research in order to write a book on the subject), George discovers the real identity of the boy....his twin brother.

Larry Hart doesn't know how it just so happened he ran into George Daly, but he's glad he did. George is about to rue the day he ever began his search, but Larry is going to benefit greatly from it. George's art dealer wife, Sara, is so engrossed in herself and her own extra-curricular activities that she doesn't even realize a large part of her life has changed.....but maybe she's better off living in that ignorance.

But it doesn't end there....a sequence of shocking events, fraught with danger and revenge, followed by an incredible revelation make for an unbelievable conclusion.

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David Ambrose knows how to tell a story. He makes the reader not only feel the characters but also feel for what they are going through. Once those characters have gained their three-dimensional status, he throws in a mind-boggling twist that by many other authors just wouldn't be acceptable.

Rather than have this story be a singular narrative which would create confusion-causing holes, Mr. Ambrose has split it into sections. Each section is told from the perspective of one of the three main characters, so that there is never any doubt of what one may have thought or felt or been experiencing at any given time.

David Ambrose has spun an engaging tale full of interesting stories of coincidence and one man's search bringing him answers he never thought possible.

Rating:
Summary: Difficult to put down!
Review: I started reading this book to kill an hour and ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting. It was so good I just couldn't put it down.

I don't want to give a synopsis because the book is full of surprises right from the start and any detailed plot discussion would ruin it for the reader. I will say that there are many interesting actually documented coincidences presented in the book. Different characters narrate different sections of the book, which gives more than one perspective of events. Also, there are a lot of coincidences that occur in the plot that turn out to be just that (coincidences, that is) and other situations where what we think is coincidence, was carefully orchestrated by one of the characters.

Prior to reading this book, I read Ambrose's "Superstition, which was also excellent and was written in a totally different style. It looks like Mr. Ambrose is a highly talented writer with many varying ideas.

Rating:
Summary: Difficult to put down!
Review: I started reading this book to kill an hour and ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting. It was so good I just couldn't put it down.

I don't want to give a synopsis because the book is full of surprises right from the start and any detailed plot discussion would ruin it for the reader. I will say that there are many interesting actually documented coincidences presented in the book. Different characters narrate different sections of the book, which gives more than one perspective of events. Also, there are a lot of coincidences that occur in the plot that turn out to be just that (coincidences, that is) and other situations where what we think is coincidence, was carefully orchestrated by one of the characters.

Prior to reading this book, I read Ambrose's "Superstition, which was also excellent and was written in a totally different style. It looks like Mr. Ambrose is a highly talented writer with many varying ideas.

Rating:
Summary: Fun but not unflawed
Review: This story is an entertaining, quick read that plays pleasant tricks with your mind. My favorite scenes are the ones in which the main character encounters bizarre coincidences (he has a dream, for instance, about being in cab #444 at 4:44 pm; he wakes up and finds that it's 4:44 am). Some will find that the last fourth of the book is too much of a deus ex machina, but I didn't mind. I do think the book makes the classic mistake of a "novel of ideas," which is talking about the ideas as well as leading us toward them. (I don't want to read in a novel about Jung's theory of synchronicity; I just want to feel the thrill of synchronicity itself -- as I do in the 4:44 dream scene.) By the way, for a more powerful, better-crafted, more enigmatic exploration of similar themes (writers searching for mystic patterns in New York), don't miss Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy."