Review by ejl2623 - Nobody's Fool

ejl2623 's review for:

Nobody's Fool by Harlan Coben

5.0

adventurous funny mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Harlan Coben brings us a second novel starring Sami Kierce, a former Manhattan detective who lost his job because of inappropriate approaches to his investigations. I really enjoyed the plot, characters and writing in this novel. Coben never disappoints, but this time, he wowed me! Sami graduated from a prestigious private school where he was a scholarship student, then a prestigious college and is accepted to medical school. He is heading on a summer backpacking trip with very well-off friends from high school, having deferred his entry to medical school. While in Spain, he falls for Anna, a woman he meets in a bar, and they have a vacation fling that feels kind of serious to Sami. It ends badly and changes the entire trajectory of Sami's life.

Sami's first fiancé, another police officer, was murdered twenty years earlier. Thanks to his termination from the force, her convicted killer is being released based on Sami's conflict of interest in working on the investigation and assertions of wrongdoing. He is happily married, deeply in debt, has an infant son and works as a private investigator. He also teaches a pay as you go weekly class on crime solving, with each week's theme based on a Sherlock Holmes quote placed on the blackboard.

The class members are a hodgepodge of older women who try to solve cold cases online, an obviously wealthy guy who obviously plays golf, a woman Sami uses in some of his divorce investigations who is very poor and the unhoused, unhinged man she gives a sandwich each night. Three influencer type women round out the class, which has grown in recent weeks from a much smaller attendance rate. One night, twenty years after he last saw Anna, a woman stops in the doorway of his class and Sami is convinced it is Anna. This starts him on the road to finding out where she seems to live, who owns the well guarded mansion she apparently lives in, a cold case mystery surrounding the kidnapping of a daughter of the house, and just in general, Remi's getting involved when he shouldn't. Simultaneously, since his fiancé's alleged murderer was not pardoned, he might get retried. Sami wants to find new proof to nail him, but it's looking like they got the wrong guy.

In a great spirited move, Remi engages his most talented students in an advanced version of his course, kind of an adult group of Baker Street Irregulars. There is a definite need to follow the bouncing ball in the two very much fun and sometimes scary investigations. The ending was a great surprise but the clues were there. The characters were a lot of fun. The writing was Coben at his best which is the best!

Content Warnings