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jayneyh314 's review for:
Nobody's Fool
by Harlan Coben
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A year after the events of “Fool Me Once” and life looks a little different for former Detective Sami Kierce as events from his past come back to haunt him. During a break from college Sami and his friends went on a trip around Europe, until Sami met a girl, Anna, and decided to stay in Spain with her rather than continue on the trip. All is going well until he wakes up one morning next to her dead body, covered in bloody and holding a knife. He panics, and runs. In the present day he’s now an unlicensed private investigator who teaches a class on criminology and when Anna walks into and then straight back out of his classroom one day he chases after her and becomes embroiled in a decades long mystery with one of New York’s wealthy families.
“Nobody’s Fool” is due to be published on 27 March and I received an eArc via NetGalley and the publisher Random House UK, in exchange for this honest review.
Firstly, if, like me, you’ve come to this after reading the book of “Fool Me Once” and not having watched the Netflix show you may be a little confused. Sami Kierce was originally Roger Kierce in the book but Coben seems to have decided to switch up the character a little to match the Netflix version of him instead.
I really enjoyed this. Coben is on fine form. There are twists and turns galore, we get some great returning characters with the Burkett family from “Fool Me Once” making another appearance and a brief mention of Frank Ache who I’ve seen in some of the Myron Bolitar books.
There’s kind of two stories running on this one. There’s the mystery around Anna from Sami’s college days and also Tad Grayson, the man who murdered Sami’s fiancee has been released from prison on the basis of Sami’s misconduct whilst he was a Detective, in part due to the events of “Fool Me Once”, and Sami is keen to prove that he’s guilty and get him back in prison. My one complaint would be that there wasn’t enough time given to the Tad Grayson storyline. It’s not a particularly long book and I felt the end of that storyline in particular was a little rushed and would have benefitted from a few more pages being given to it.
I loved the students in Kierce’s class. They were such a little rag tag bunch and, again, a slightly higher page count would have allowed for more time to be given to developing them a little more.
If you’re a fan of Coben’s work this will definitely be for you, it’s fast paced and full of twists and turns to keep you gripped from beginning to end.