Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben was born on January 4, 1962^[1] into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, and was raised in Livingston,^[2] where he graduated from Livingston High School, with his childhood friend, future governor Chris Christie.^[3] His brother is the noted businessman Lawrence S. Coben.

He studied political science at Amherst College, where he was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity, along with Dan Brown.^[4][5] Coben was in his senior year at college when he realized he wanted to write.^[6]

After graduating in 1984, Coben worked in the travel industry, in a company owned by his grandfather.^[4][6] It was during that time when he wrote his first book, romantic suspense thriller Play Dead, which was accepted for publication when he was 26 and released in 1990.^[6] It was followed by Miracle Cure in 1991. He then began writing a series of thrillers featuring a former basketball player turned sports agent, Myron Bolitar, who often finds himself investigating murders involving his clients.

Tell No One, his first stand-alone thriller since the creation of the Myron Bolitar series in 1995, was published in 2001. A French-language film adaptation based on the book was released in 2006.^[7] Coben followed Tell No One with nine more stand-alone novels. His novel Hold Tight, published on April 15, 2008, was his first book to debut at number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list.^[8]

In 2003, Coben published a short story about his father, who had died of a heart attack at the age of 59 in 1988.^[9][10] Entitled "The Key to My Father," the story was published in The New York Times on Father's Day, June 15, 2003.^[11] Besides The New York Times, his essays and columns have appeared in Parade magazine and Bloomberg Views.^[12]

In 2025, Coben published his first collaborative co-authored novel, Gone Before Goodbye, with Reese Witherspoon.^[13]

Coben's books have been translated into 46 languages and sold over 90 million copies.^[9] He has won an Edgar Award, a Shamus Award, and an Anthony Award—the first author to receive all three.^[14][15]

In 2010, Live Wire won the crime fiction award, the RBA Prize for Crime Writing, worth €125,000.^[16]

In 2023, the Japanese edition of Win, translated by Toshiki Taguchi, was nominated for the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Mystery Fiction in Translation.^[17][18]

Coben's first book to be adapted for the screen was Tell No One. Director Guillaume Canet made a French-language film, based on the book, titled Ne le dis à personne, in 2006.^[7]

Coben's 2003 book No Second Chance became the basis for the 2015 French miniseries of the same name. Two years later the same happened to Just One Look.

Coben is the creator of the British crime drama television show The Five, which first aired in April 2016 on the Sky 1 channel in the United Kingdom.^[33][34][35] Coben also created the French-British crime drama television show Safe, which premiered on Netflix in 190 countries on May 10, 2018.^[36][37]

Coben lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey, with his wife Anne Armstrong-Coben, a pediatrician, and their four children. His daughter, Charlotte, wrote two episodes of the TV series Run Away, of which he is an executive producer. They have also worked together on Dead Hot, Fool Me Once and Harlan Coben's Shelter.^{[12][57] [58]}