Book Review: Fool Me Once

Fool Me Once

Flimsy improbable plot, singularly uninteresting sub-plots that go nowhere, hackneyed characters with the emotional depth of a paper doll, Harlan Coben's latest suspense thriller Fool Me Once has it all. Throw in an unstable female protagonist suffering from PTSD, her disgraced military career, and her (or the author's) ambiguous pontification on gun control, the novel takes an even more bizarre turn as Maya Stern, the said female character, sleuths it out to find her husband's murderer, even if it meant putting her life in the crossfire. And in the end when all is revealed in a ridiculous over-the-top climax (I won't spoil it for you), in retrospect, none of her actions make sense. If all you care about are twists and turns, Fool Me Once bamboozles and fools you enough number of times to keep you guessing and reading all the way to the end, but otherwise, don't bother with this tripe.