Harlan Coben always brings the goods. I don’t know if I read this from him in an interview somewhere, but it’s apt, nonetheless: He must surely sit around thinking, “What if this happened to a normal person? And then this? And then that?” And it works! I love when a “normal” person is caught up in the eye of the hurricane, to paraphrase the main character from his 2016 novel, Fool Me Once.
Maya, that main character, is a veteran, mother, and wife, who lost her career in the military after she blew up a SUV of civilians and the video of the incident was leaked to the a Wikileaks-like whistleblower organization. Coben mentions in the Acknowledgements about proudly serving with the United Service Organizations, a nonprofit serving men and women in uniform by bringing America to them, and talking with servicemembers about their time serving in war. Those experiences surely informed and inspired this book, as Maya deals with the PTSD from the SUV incident and in general, the difficult of trying to acclimate back to civilian life. Humans aren’t wired to be “programmed” for war, experience war, and then go back to civilian life with the programming abruptly turned back off. Which serves Maya well, at least as it regards the plot of Fool Me Once.
The book starts off with Joe’s murder (Maya’s husband) in Central Park. But is there more to it? Maya’s sister was also murdered. Were both coincidental robberies and burglaries, respectively, gone wrong? Doubtful. Maya begins tugging on the strings, and those strings lead back to two places, one likely and one unlikely: a.) the Burkett family, the wealthy, powerful clan Joe was the eldest son of; and b.) Corey, the leader of the whistleblower organization that leaked the SUV video, which is unlikely in the sense that Corey and Maya work together to unravel the mystery because it turns out, Claire, Maya’s sister was also working with Corey (or manipulated into working with him, depending on your viewpoint). Whatever Claire was working on got her killed, and presumably, then got Joe killed, since they worked together.
Fool Me Once works more efficiently and better than other Coben books — and I love those books, too! — because it’s not overly permeated by some of his hallmark sarcasm and quips, although they’re still here, like how Maya observes the absurdity of how military speak has infiltrated everyday civilian speak (see what I did there?). But Maya is no-nonsense. She’s one of the slickest, smartest, and again, most efficient (perhaps owing to her military mindset), protagonists I’ve read in a book this year. She’s going to figure out the mystery of her sister’s death, and by extension, Joe’s, and she’s going to deduce it piece by piece, person by person, event by event, going all the way back to Joe’s fancy boarding school in Philadelphia.
As it happens, we find out late in the book that Joe is a sociopath, who is willing to maim and kill people who get in his way, including a fellow classmate, and his own brother, back in those boarding school days. We then learn that Maya hasn’t been a reliable narrator: She killed her husband because he killed Claire. Meticulous and efficient, Maya realized when she came back to the States that her gun safe and guns were different. She suspected Joe in Claire’s murder, and followed up with a ballistics test. Welp. He was the culprit. She killed him (and to be fair, he did try to kill her, but she took the firing pin out of the weapon). But the thrust of the plot was still trying to figure out Claire’s story — yes, she knew Joe did it, but she needed to know why and how much of the Burkett family was involved. They all were, up to and including the matriarchy.
In a surprising turn of events, even more surprising than Maya being the one who killed Joe, Maya gets a confession out of the Burkett family on a hidden nanny cam at their estate, and then Neil, Joe’s brother, shoots her (I think he was going to claim self-defense). I thought for sure, especially since Maya was just with Shane, her best friend from the military, that she was wearing a bulletproof vest. Surely, she wouldn’t actually sacrifice her life to prove the Burkett family was dirty, and leave behind her 2-year-old daughter.
Nope. She died. Coben killed her! We even time jump an astonishing 25 years into the future where the 2-year-old, who was raised by her uncle, Claire’s husband, has a kid of her own. Arguably, even if righteous, Maya did something akin to suicide-by-cop, but with the villains of the story. She didn’t have to die to expose the truth! Alas, I think the weight of what she had done — killing civilians during the war and killing her husband in cold blood (even if she felt justified) — weighed on her too much.
Suspense and thriller books often get called “gripping,” but it truly applies with Fool Me Once. I was even reading the book in a short chunk before work, which never happens. I needed to know how the mystery unfolded and what was going on! Well-done, Coben, well-done. Coben fans, if they haven’t read this one, will love it. It’s one of his best I’ve read.
Milam's Musings 