Fool Me Once

Yet another one of Harlan Coben’s thrillers. He has done so many of them by now, he could do these in his sleep.

The story opens with Maya attending her husband’s funeral. Soon it becomes clear that her husband was gunned down before her eyes.

Maya and her two-year old daughter now have to cope with life without him and Maya gets back to work to take care of finances. Things slowly limp back to normal.

But when a friend offers Maya a nanny cam, she sees something on the video that makes her rethink what happened to her husband. Soon Maya is off investigating trying to figure out what exactly happened.

Is Maya going nuts, or are people around her hiding a big secret?

My Review

Boy, was this a fast-paced read! I have been on a bit of a book slowdown of late (too many late nights at work, too much time spent outdoors on weekends), so my reading pace has suffered a bit, but in spite of that, this book was unputdownable.

I found myself racing through all the twists and turns (and there are many) trying to figure out what happened along with Maya.

So lost was I in this rare sinful pleasure (these days) of racing through a book late into the night that I was able to ignore a couple of the flaws that would have bothered me otherwise.

One flaw was Maya. She seemed so detached from her surroundings. Of course, there is a sensible explanation at the end for her attitude, but because she seemed detached, I also ended up being not as invested in what was going on. I also thought that there was so much emphasis placed on the pacing of the novel, that character build-up just fell by the wayside. The secondary characters felt very much like stock characters – the good friend, the manipulative mother-in-law, and so on. It was all a little rote reading.

That said, there were many genuinely thrilling moments. And I also thought Coben wrote very humanely and honestly about PTSD and the trauma that soldiers returning from Iraq face when they get back home. And I love how he connected present-day events (such as Wikileaks) and wove them into the plot.

All these elements mixed in with the plot make it a solid, good, but not great contemporary thriller.

I saw ads for these books splashed all over Crossword bookstore this week, and all for good reason. This is going to be a bestseller.

Huge thanks to Penguin Random House for sending over a copy of this book for review.

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