Coben's new thriller a frenetic affair

Winnipeg Free Press

10-05-2025

Disgraced ex-New York cop/private eye Sami Kierce learns the man who murdered his fiancé is out of prison — just as he sees a woman walking around town whose blood-drenched corpse he woke up next to, while holding a bloody knife, in Italy 22 years ago.
We're not even close to covering his issues: That 'dead' woman may be an all-American heiress who'd been kidnapped before Sami 'murdered' her, and reappeared out of nowhere while claiming (in classic murder mystery style) a case of 11 years of amnesia.
Harlan Coben's Nobody's Fool (Grand Central Publishing, 352 pages, $40) is a busy sequel to Fool Me Once that relies way too much on backstory, but written in Coben's frenetic style, never allows you time to say, 'Yeah, OK, but wait a second, eh?'
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Single mom/marathoner Adele needs the $1 million prize in a scuzzy online reality show of deadly hide-and-seek, after her scoundrel husband defrauded their entire community and scarpered.
The last winner of the game hid so well that no one ever saw her again. This season is in an abandoned luxury hotel on an island jungle in the Atlantic Ocean, with sleazy online influencers and possibly an uninvited guest or two with murderous intent.
Lisa Unger's Close Your Eyes and Count to 10 (Park Row, 384 pages, $37) is the latest in a growing sub-genre of creepy reality show murder mysteries full of people you'd never want to meet in real life, leaving you wondering how self-appointed influencers can make so much more money than we do.
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An industrialist dead in his office of a somewhat fishy heart attack, his secretary soon dead in a one-car mishap on a rural road, a Yugoslavian stranger who has no seeming purpose in spending time in a small French town, a one-hit-wonder author whose mother says he's trying to kill her.
Divorced chief of police Georges Gorski can't get overly excited about any of it; lovelorn, living with his mother who should be in a home, Gorski spends his days drifting from one bar to another, drinking far too much, until an evil idea takes root.
Published in November 2024, Graeme Macrae Burnet's A Case of Matricide (Biblioasis, 288 pages, $25) is supposedly Burnet's translation of a long-forgotten discovered manuscript of the late enigmatic French author Raymond Brunet, whose story parallels… enough. It's depressing, intriguing and quite engrossing.
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It's a quiet first rodeo in the B.C. interior for Hammerhead Jed and his IRA cousin Declan, all fun and games and potential canoodling and booze galore, until a gay couple working as rodeo clowns are killed an hour apart.
Hammerhead Jed — a pro wrestler, Vancouver private eye and Dairy Queen banana milkshake influencer extraordinaire — immediately sleuths, setting off a full day of punch-ups, bashings upside the head (both inflicting and inflicted), umpteen hogties, ornery animals and ornerier folk… a normal day in Hammerhead's world.
Published in October 2024, A.J. Devlin's Bronco Buster (NeWest Press, 276 pages, $23), the fourth in the series, is amiable enough nonsense, humourous in small doses, though it's pretty easy to figure out the villain.
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Saigon, 1928: three young men of the Vietnamese wealthy elite and their far more powerful French friend get drunk and crazed on opium, wantonly raping and beating workers who are slaves in all but name, even killing them — until one of the four is killed.
Published in November 2024, Jacquie Pham's Those Opulent Days (Atlantic Monthly Press, 288 pages, $35) is a stunning debut, horrifying in its depiction of life under a European power, with its local collaborators rolling in money while producing natural resources to be shipped overseas.
How accurate this beguiling whodunit is must be left to those who know the history.
Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin reckons that anyone who wakes up beside a bloody corpse while clutching a knife should be the one claiming amnesia.