Harlan Coben’s Nobody’s Fool starts with young Sami Kierce taking some time after college to backpack across Europe. He in in Spain when he meets Anna. They hit it off. One morning he wakes up with a knife in his hand next to her dead body. Harlan Coben skips quite a few years and Kierce is now a disgraced cop. He had a fiancee, a fellow cop. She was killed on the job and her killer has just been released after the case was reviewed. Presently he is married, has a child, and is a private investigator. Now that, my friends, are quite a few chronological leaps.
Kierce also gives a pay-as-you-go night class in detecting which has a few faithful students. One night he sees Anna walk in his classroom and leave immediately. He chases her but is not quite successful. He finds out the mystery woman’s name is Victoria Belmond. Belmond comes from a rich family and once disappeared for eleven years. Kierce enrolls his best detecting class students to help him solve the mystery. Unfortunately, though they occasionally contribute, I found Harlan Coben did not use that feature to its full potential.
Halfway through Harlan Coben Nobody’s Fool Belmond’s father pays gives Kierce a three month NDA contract to investigate what happened to his daughter. At the same time, Kierce’s wife gets the impression she is being stalked. She is.
A couple of spoilers happen after Kierce’s trip to Spain where he reconstructs what happened way back when. The reveal makes sense and taps into what most readers probably suspected about one of the secondary characters. The epilogue is interesting as it ties things together better and more satisfactorily.
Aside from the first four or five Myron Bolitar mystery novels Harlan Coben is a rather uneven writer. I found Nobody’s Fool a good enough mystery but not one that would automatically make me look into what else the writer has produced.
Nobody’s Fool
Harlan Coben
Grand Central Publishing 2026
340 pages
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