2017 reading challenge: (advanced list) best seller from 2016

[baronessekat]

Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The premise sounded interesting. Former Army Pilot Mia's husband is murdered, just a couple months after her sister's grizzly murder. Her best friend gives her a nanny camera to help her keep an eye on the house and her 2 year old daughter while she's out. One night, she checks the footage and sees her dead husband playing with her daughter. This causes her to start her own investigation into the events regarding both murders.

The description of the plot caught my attention, though the genre is not one I generally gravitate towards. But the actual story was far from as exciting as I expected by the write up.

Shortly into the book, I feel that Mia is not displaying any form of grief for a supposedly loving widow. She keeps referring to this scandal that caused an abrupt end to her military career but never goes into details, other than saying that if all information came to light, she would be even more ruined than she was already. She treats one of her best friends like crap. I start classifying her as an unreliable narrator - which instantly makes me hate her. Her continued behavior, the lack of logic to much of the story, the vagueness to actions and behaviors made me literally cry out once "stop pussyfooting around and hinting and just say what you mean".

When we finally do learn all the "sordid" details, I found myself going "you know what, I honestly don't care". And I didn't. In the end I was just grateful for the end of the book.

This was my first introduction to the author and upon reading other reviews of this book, I find that he follows pretty much the same formula for them all. And since I really didn't like this one, you can bet, I'm not going to bother reading anything else by him. The only reason this book got 2 stars is because the audiobook narrator made it something I could actually finish.



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