She Treads Softly: Nobody's Fool

Sunday, March 2, 2025

Nobody's Fool

Nobody's Fool by Harlan Coben
3/25/25; 352 pages
Grand Central
Sami Kierce #2

Nobody's Fool by Harlan Coben is an excellent, very highly recommended, twisty investigative thriller. You don't want to miss this one!

Sami Kierce, a young college grad backpacking in Spain with friends when he meets Anna in a nightclub in Fuengirola. His friends move on but Sami stays on with Anna until one morning he wakes up, covered in blood with a knife in his hand, and the body of Anna beside him. He doesn’t know what happened. He screams and then he runs.

Twenty-two years later Sami is a former NYPD cop now working as a PI for a law firm and teaching wannabe sleuths at a night school in New York City. When Sami sees a woman peeking her head in the door, he can't believe his eyes. It is Anna. He chases her down the hall and manages to get a tracker into her coat pocket before she flees. How can it be possible that she is alive?

What follows is an un-put-downable, action-packed, masterful investigative thriller where events from Sami's past come to the forefront in the present. Sami is not only searching for answers about Anna, there are numerous other things going on all at the same time. The tension runs high, the twists and reveals are nonstop, and the action gallops throughout the unpredictable but extremely well-executed plot right to the stunning ending.

Sami is a fully realized character who is portrayed as a unique, intelligent individual with a keen mind and a sense of humor. He is happily married to Molly and they have a one-year-old son, Henry. The plot unfolds through Sami's point-of-view. This is the second Sami Kierce novel following Fool Me Once but it can easily be read as a standalone.

No spoilers included here - read Nobody's Fool and thank me later. Thanks to Grand Central for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.