Colin Harrison (1) (1960–)

Jack Whitman is a lonely VP (his wife had been killed in a drive-by several years earlier) in the “Corporation,” which is the largest media company in the world. One day on the way home he sees a woman and her four-year-old daughter on the subway (no cabs being available in the rain) and as she gets off, gives her his card, saying he could help her with a job. He thinks nothing more of it until she and her daughter arrive at his 39th floor office. She loses the job he gets her within a show more week. Against his better judgment (I’ll say) he locates the woman again. He finds a place for her to live in a building being remodeled, but the woman's husband discovers her location, trashes the building and they barely escape. So he invites her to stay in his house where he has an empty basement apartment.

In the meantime, there is a coup and counter-coup going on at the “Corporation.” At first I thought all the corporate stuff was getting in the way of the story, but as things progress, you realize that all of that is integral to defining who Jack is. Rather than supply additional details and litter my review with spoilers, I’ll just note that for me the book was a meditation on what it means to be a family and how members of families interact (or don’t) under external and personal pressures.

The technology is dated (wow, a 256 megabyte chip - that’s huge), but the human interactions and conflict are not. Harrison writes really well and the sense of foreboding clutches at the reader throughout driving one forward toward the conclusion. This is the third Harrison I’ve read, and he’s now on the must-read list. show less

The cover of this book drew me to it when it first came out, and I simply couldn't resist it. Then, it sat on my shelf all this time because the description just didn't seem quite as entrancing as the cover... until I began reading.

Harrison's depiction of a map-collecting New York immigration lawyer, along with the city itself and the all-too-real characters around him, is marvelous. At first, I wasn't even quite sure what sort of story I was reading, but within a few chapters, I couldn't show more put it down. The tightly wound story is so beautifully written and drawn with such care that it's impossible to call this either suspense or literary fiction--or even anything in between. There's suspense, certainly, as well as crime, romance, and such a deft hand with character that even the smallest of characters seem utterly real.

I'd recommend this to anyone who'd care to be drawn into an intelligent New York story hovering between suspense and literary fiction, and I'll be picking up the rest of Colin Harrison's work now, as well. show less

I saw a license plate yesterday that said 'I Miss New York,' so I smashed their window and stole their radio. Sorry, couldn't resist beginning with a one-liner aimed at the city famous for one-liners.

Colin Harrison’s 2017 novel You Belong to Me captures the vibrant, pulsating, dynamic, electrifying surge of the city of New York. Sure, the story features riveting dramas of men and women from all walks of life, super rich to dirt poor, an entire rainbow of nationalities and ethnicities, but show more through it all, we feel the throbbing of the Big Apple aka Gotham aka Fun City aka the City that Never Sleeps.

As with the author’s previous novels, You Belong to Me is a keen study in sociology. Here's a snippet from a three page reflection on the current state of the union: "The United States, meanwhile, was steadily fracturing into two populations: those few who had enough money and those many who didn’t. Vast sections of the country were economically dead, its inhabitants hypnotized by the Internet, zombied by pharmaceuticals, illegal drugs, and Christian-identity babble, the family structure destroyed by successive decades of divorce, job loss, and domestic violence.”

Jennifer is one of the poor who has traveled to Manhattan to escape the economically dead small city of Reading, Pennsylvania where she never knew her father and her mother became a oxycontin zombie.

Alas, one of thousands of young ladies wishing to make it in the big city. Although Jennifer lacks money and connections, refinement and polish, culture and college, lacks talent of any sort (zero ability to paint, write, dance, act or model), Jennifer comes to New York City a few months shy of age twenty with one incredible advantage – she's not only stunningly beautiful but is a certain kind of perfect American girl, instantly recognizable, bringing to mind Daryl Hannah or Gwyneth Paltrow.



After a few years trading mostly on her looks - catering, girlfriend for lonely, generous Brit, hot real estate agent, Jennifer meets Ahmed, a tall, elegant, brilliant Harvard Law School educated international financial wiz from an Iranian-American family who happens to be incredibly wealthy with the prospect of amassing even greater wealth. However, with his name, his country of origin, the color of his skin and the texture of his hair, there is one thing Ahmed desperately needs to be completely assimilated – an exceptionally attractive all-American girl for a wife. Ahmed pursues Jennifer; Ahmed marries Jennifer, Ahmed has his trophy. And as far as Ahmed is concerned, Jennifer is his, completely his. Thus the novel's title.

The inclusion of Ahmed in the story lets Colin Harrison gracefully segue to observations about the increasing influence of other races and ethnic groups, especially Latinos, Asians and Middle-Easterners, and most especially by all those bright foreign students churned out by the Ivy League who decide to stay in the United States. I would even go so far as to suggest You Belong to Me could be used as supplemental reading in a college course in urban sociology.

Well, at least Jennifer is allowed to be friends with the guy who also lives on the same floor in her swank Upper West Side apartment building - Paul Reeves, a fifty-year-old twice divorced immigration lawyer. Paul’s passion is maps, his specialty, valuable maps of New York City made in the early years, as far back as the mid-1600s. Paul frequents the auctions for rich buyers at Christie’s when maps are the feature items up for sale.


1843 map of Manhattan

The opening chapter of the novel takes place at one such auction at Christie's, where Jennifer, now married to Ahmed who is off in Europe on business, joins Paul as he is about to bid on a map he has had his eye on for years.

Then the unexpected happens: a large young man, well over six feet, dressed in soldier gear appears in the room. Jennifer recognizes him and immediately leaves her seat. He wraps his arms around Jennifer and looks out defiantly for anybody in the room, especially Paul, to interfere. The next moment, the two, Jennifer and the big man, leave together.

As we learn quickly, this hawkish looking soldier, muscular, blonde, sun-beaten, is Billy Wilkerson, recently discharged from the army follow tours in Afghanistan, Somalia and Africa. Billy Wilkerson drove his red truck up from his family's ranch in Texas to New York City to find Jennifer. He and Jennifer go back. The plot quickly thickens. And how.

You Belong to Me is a sizzling. fast-paced crime thriller making more sharp turns than a taxi cab racing from Grand Central Station to Brooklyn. Much of the time we follow Paul Reeves but the focus shifts to a number of other big action players: Ahmed's Influential Uncle in Los Angeles, Ahmed's relative Amir in Hong Kong, Paul's entrepreneurial, yoga practicing girlfriend Rachel, NYC muscle men from Lebanon, Iran, Mexico, a NYC detective, map restoration experts, and, of course, Ahmed, Jennifer, and Billy.

Another neat feature is each of the 52 chapters notes the location for the ensuing action - for example: East Eighty-Second Street and Madison Avenue, Manhattan; North Vine Avenue, Palm Springs, California; Fitness Ultimatum, Queens Boulevard, Queens, New York; Plaza Hotel, Central Park South, Manhattan. In this way, it's as if we are following a map (ah, maps!) as we track the ever accelerating action chapter to chapter.

A major theme to keep in mind: wisdom versus emotions and impulse. Are the younger men and women listening and learning from the older men? (Sorry, the only older woman in the novel is Jennifer's mother, at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from wisdom), Can such hard won wisdom be passed on or must people make their own mistakes and learn the hard way?

How much knowledge and insight and richness of perspective is gained with an appreciation of history and geography through maps? What are we to make of Paul's obsession with maps? Curiously, Colin Harrison, also a man obsessed with his map collection, could put much of his own first-hand experience with maps to use in this novel. My sense is Colin and Paul share a good bit in common beyond maps since Colin wrote his novel when in his 50s, the same age range as Paul.

A first-rate read. Highly recommended!


New York City novelist Colin Harrison, born 1960

Paul Reeves in the same room with a much loved map: "Magnificent, the Ratzer. A map used by George Washington to defend the new republic in a time when American was more an idea than anything else and the island of Manhattan a town of a mere twelve thousand souls living in shingled and clapboard wood houses, with the occasional old farmhouse." - Colin Harrison, You Belong to Me show less

Colin Harrison's novel is not only a thriller but a study in sociology, psychology and cross cultural collisions, a novel of hard-boiled language and fast-paced action. As way of example, here are several quotes from the opening pages:

Thriller - "My name is Jack Whitman and I should never have had the first thing to do with her - not with what was happening at the Corporation at the time. But I'm as weak hearted for love and greedy for power as the next guy, maybe more so. And I was crazy show more for the sex - of course that was part of it." Jack Whitman is the first-person narrator and this is how the novel opens, an opening Raymond Chandler and his fictional private-eye Phillip Marlow would appreciate.

Sociology - "And it was equally clear that if the woman had been dressed in a pair of tight jeans and cheap red pumps, she might be a New York-born Puerto Rican whore addicted to self-destruction, carrying a purse filed with rubbers and wrinkled bills and selling herself to all comers at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, a woman who, despite providence's gift of fine bones and large, deep eyes, was forced to love life faster and harder than was ever meant." The author has Jack Whitman make pointed, telling and sometimes scathing observations about society on nearly every page.

Psychology - "Morrison, second in command in the Corporation, the man everyone feared . . . . Morrison had lost half a leg and most of a hand as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam, having survived, he had the confidence of five men. Combat had shown him that we are all merely walking bags of meat, and once a man has decided that, all manner of brilliant scheming becomes possible." Indeed, Harrison's novel is a study in corporate psychology. One could argue Bodies Electric should be required reading for anybody contemplating a career in the business world, particularly the American business world.

Cross-Cultural Collisions - "What is certain is that as Liz waited for the light, a silver BMW with tinted windows . . . pulled over and someone poked the short metal barrel of a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol over the electric window and started shooting. . . . Liz was right in the way of it." Liz was Jack Whitman's beautiful young pregnant wife and both Liz and her seven month old daughter in the womb were killed by a Harlem gang's bullets. New York City aka the Big Apple as the American melting pot on speed. Harrison loves the city (and he said so directly in an interview) and captures NYC's hyper-energizing hum.

The characters play for high stakes, as well they should, since they are each caught in an emotionally-charged net of circumstances and faced with life and death choices. Regarding our main character, Jack Whitman - he sees the twenty-something cinnamon-skinned beauty with her 4 year old girl on the subway in two ways: as Madonna and Child and as an exotic sexually-charged object of desire. In the aftermath of his tragic loss, the magnetic pull is too powerful to resist (one way to think of Whitman's attraction is in terms of Carl Jung's archetype, the `anima'). Whitman hands her his business card and offers help, which turns out to be the first step in a series of events swirling himself and others in unexpected and sometimes dark, violent directions. For my money, Bodies Electric is a modern classic. show less