Kierce. His primary source of income is teaching a night school criminology course.

Kierce’s life changes when he recognizes one of his new students as the supposedly dead girlfriend from two decades ago. He follows her and learns that she is Victoria Belmond, a woman from a very wealthy family who mysteriously disappeared as a teenager on December 31, 1999 (the eve of Y2K). She then, just as mysteriously, reappeared in a Maine diner a decade later. Victoria claims to have amnesia regarding the missing decade, and there is no external evidence about her activities or whereabouts during that time. Kierce’s financial situation improves tremendously when Victoria’s father hires him to investigate what happened to his daughter during the missing decade.

I mentioned Kierce must solve three interrelated mysteries in Nobody’s Fool. This third mystery involves the death of his fiancée soon after he joined the police. The woman’s abusive ex-boyfriend was convicted of her murder, but his conviction has just been vacated because of Kierce’s problems with the law. The ex-boyfriend insists he’s innocent, and he and his lawyer persuade Kierce to look into the murder again.

I always thought that Ross MacDonald, creator of Lew Archer, wrote the best complex mysteries of any hardboiled author. MacDonald’s plots often involved years-old crimes that had remained buried until Archer began poking around. The plot of Nobody’s Fool could have come straight from an Archer novel, with the added complication that Sami Kierce is a primary character in the mysteries he’s trying to solve. He must reevaluate his own memories about his college fling and what happened afterward. The novel’s storyline becomes increasingly complex, but mostly, it is easy for readers to follow. Harlan Coben surpasses Ross MacDonald by introducing multiple twists and surprises that lead readers to reassess their opinions about past events. Fans of whodunit mysteries will enjoy Nobody’s Fool although the question isn’t “whodunit” but “what really happened.”

Much of what Kierce discovers is depressing, but the author lightens the book’s mood with a healthy dose of humor. Kierce can dispense wisecracks with the best of them. Part of the fun lies in the nicknames he gives some of the book’s characters, such as Scraggly Dude, Golf Shirt Gary, and the Pink Panthers. Those last two nicknames refer to students in Kierce’s criminology class that he recruits to help with some of the background research on the case. The Panthers are septuagenarians who find solving actual crimes a hoot. Gary always wears a golf shirt for class as a reminder of the incident that changed his life for the worse. His tale of woe is one of the best and saddest anecdotes in the book. The author maintains an appropriate tone throughout the novel. As the storyline becomes less pleasant, the author drops most of the humorous asides to preserve the proper mood.

I had some minor problems with the plotting in the book. The ultimate resolution depends on a couple of huge coincidences of the sort that never occur in real life but are common in crime fiction, helping authors and protagonists out of trouble. More important for me was the author’s reference to the earlier book in this series. Authors don’t have to recap everything that happened earlier in a series. However, if events in a previous book affect what happens in the current story, the author should give readers enough of the backstory to avoid confusion. Here, events in the earlier volume, Fool Me Once, impact Nobody’s Fool. However, unless readers are familiar with the earlier story or (like me) do some internet research, the author’s vague references will be more confusing than informative. Harlan Coben is too good a writer to have such sloppiness, even in a small part of the novel.

Despite these minor annoyances, Nobody’s Fool is one of the best Harlan Coben novels I’ve read. Sami Kierce is a likable character with a complex, realistic life story. The book also features entertaining secondary characters, some of whom appear only for a chapter or two. Above all, this is one tricky puzzler of a novel whose twists caught me entirely by surprise more than once. Nobody’s Fool is Harlan Coben at the top of his game.  

NOTE: The publisher graciously provided me with a copy of this book through NetGalley. However, the decision to review the book and the contents of this review are entirely my own.