Harlan Coben

If the bestselling, award-winning novelist Harlan Coben has a secret to enthralling readers, it's that his characters aren't, for the most part globetrotting spies, cops on the edge, elite special forces agents or heroic defense attorneys. Coben creates suspense by putting ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances, situations which take them with appalling and gripping velocity straight from the office, the coffee shop or the classroom into nail-biting, plot-twisting territory. His latest, Run Away, opens with a simple concept: a man in Manhattan's Central Park looks across a clearing a spies, to his astonishment, the daughter who ran away from home. This being Coben, what follows feels both inevitable and absolutely unpredictable. The New Jersey based novelist joined us in the studio to talk about where his stories come from -- and the surprising tale of how he came to be a novelist.