Harlan Coben has spent decades building a career on the unreliable narrator, the small-town secret, the ordinary suburban life that turns out to be hiding something much darker underneath. This September, he’s setting all of that aside to write about himself instead. Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft, a Memoir on Writing hits shelves Tuesday, September 8, marking Coben’s first nonfiction book after building an entire career on fiction that millions of readers have devoured. The book blends a genuinely personal account of his suburban New Jersey upbringing with a direct, practical look at his own storytelling technique, less a victory lap and more an actual craft manual from someone who’s made a living pulling readers through hundreds of pages without letting them guess the ending.

What makes this tour genuinely worth tracking closely, rather than just noting the release date and moving on, is where he’s chosen to launch it. Coben could have kicked this off anywhere. He’s choosing New Jersey specifically, and the stops themselves read like a tour of the actual geography that shaped him.

Coben’s become a regular presence on Morning Joe over the years, usually stopping by to talk through one of his Netflix adaptations, Fool Me Once and Stay Close both made the jump from page to streaming with real success, or to tease whatever manuscript he’s currently buried in. Given the timing, a national television appearance right around the September 8 launch date would fit his usual promotional pattern closely, giving Plot Twist a media push well beyond the Garden State even while the actual tour stays rooted almost entirely in New Jersey towns.

Here’s my honest take on why this tour deserves more attention than a typical author signing circuit. Coben built an entire career mining suburban New Jersey for its buried secrets, and now he’s turning that same eye on himself, in the same towns, in front of the same kind of readers who’ve been buying his novels off Montclair and Livingston shelves for decades. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not just savvy marketing either. It’s a writer closing a loop, choosing to explain how the trick works in the exact places where he first learned to pull it off. If you’ve ever read one of his books and thought you had it figured out two chapters before the twist actually landed, this might be the one appearance where he finally tells you how he did it. Anyone who grew up in one of these towns and watched Coben become a local celebrity has their own version of that story, and this tour is exactly the place to bring it up if you get the chance to ask him directly at the signing table.