We Asked 13 Novelists, From Lee Child to Ruth Ware, ‘What’s the Best Murder You Ever Wrote?’ - The New York Times

Harlan Coben

I'm not big on unusual deaths, like by garbage compactor or air pressure chamber or something like that. Most of my books open with a disappearance or a surprise so that the killings I remember best are the ones that break your heart, the ones that resonate. They are also spoilers. In "The Stranger," which we are currently filming for Netflix, we get to know a certain character, get to know his (or her) life, feel for them and their awful predicament, want well for them - and so bam, when it doesn't work out, when they are murdered not even a third of the way through the book, we mourn that loss and want justice. Perhaps my most memorable murder occurs when the protagonist of a novel, the narrator who has told us the story from Page 1, gets shot and killed in the final pages.