Book Review: Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben
Maya is grieving for her husband, who recently died…or did he? (bum bum buuuuuuuum)
I love Harlan Coben books, generally.
The constant twisting of a seemingly normal life turned irrevocably upside down is so…interesting? Do we as readers sigh with relief that our normal lives remain intact? Or does at least a small part see this as an escapist fantasy, wonder if something huge may come and shake us out of our own routines?
Either way, Harlan Coben’s stories are just plain good.
Fool Me Once is a rare exception.
The reason this book gets 3 stars is because…
the end is a gotcha moment. A bait and switch. I got hoodwinked, I tells ya, and not in a clever way.
Usually with Coben, we’re slowly turning over new evidence right along with the main character. Our mixture of knowledge, despair, and confusion matches theirs.
In Fool Me Once, the main character reveals a huge detail of her own at the end that she’d been keeping from us that answered at least 75% of the questions. Sigh.
The crux of identifying with this character is that we’re equally in the dark. Coben held back info that we should have known all along, and that feels like cheating.
