Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I've heard from fans of thrillers and true crime who tell me there's something comforting about the form, which I suppose there's some irony there, but I get it, and they're not alone. The genre does gangbusters on the bestsellers list. In a bit, we'll hear about a novel that blends memoir and

true crime. But first, we've got two big names on the pod, Harlan Coben and Reese Witherspoon.

They work together on the new thriller Gone Before Goodbye. And in this interview with NPR's

Mary Louise Kelly, they actually touch on what makes popular fiction so important for society today.

That's ahead.

If you, like me, are a Harlan-Cobin fan, you're in good company.

Just about everything he writes ends up on the bestseller lists.

He's got 90 million books in print worldwide.

But even Harlan stopped in his tracks when he got a call one day,

asking if he wanted to collaborate. Sounds so braggy for me to say, well, Reese Witherspoon called

and said she wanted to meet about an idea. And just a little wary and not necessarily the guy who

collaborates on novels.

You know, novel is a very solitary activity, and it's, you know, where I spend most of my life alone.

You haven't collaborated on one before, is that right?

Never with a novel.

Well, collaborate they did.

Harlan Coben and the actress and producer, Reese Witherspoon have just published a thriller.

It's called Gone Before Goodbye. I asked them to tell me how they did it.

Our process was we would meet in person probably every other week for a few hours at his apartment and just talk about teasing it all out.

And then Harlan would write and he would

send me chapters and I would go back in and say, well, I don't think she'd say it like this. I

think she'd say it like that. Or this is amazing. Keep going. So it was a lot of texting. I love

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