According to Wikipedia, airport novels are "designed to meet the demands of a very specific market...and are superficially engaging without being necessarily profound, usually written to be more entertaining than philosophically challenging. An airport novel is typically a fairly long but fast-paced boilerplate genre-fiction novel commonly offered by airport newsstands, read for pace and plot, not elegance of phrasing". You can read the entire Wikipedia entry on airport novels here if you're so inclined but if you've spent any amount of time at all in a terminal bookshop, you already get the gist. For the record, I've read more than my fair share of airport novels over the years and actually found myself enjoying a few of them, so I lay no claim to literary taste. Having said that, I am still more apt to undertake an expeditionary trek through the K2 bottleneck with George Santos acting as my guide than to pick up another paperback by Dan Brown. Or John Grisham. Or Anthony Horowitz. Or...or....or....or Harlan Coben. And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings me to the raison d'etre for today's post: Harlan Coben. 

In recent years, Netflix has created a cottage industry of transforming Harlan Coben's airport novels into a series of immensely popular, episodic thrillers. In some cases, the best of these (The Stranger, Safe) manage to transcend the limitations of the author. However, that's not the case with Coben's latest Netflix collaboration, Fool Me Once, an arduous, ridiculously convoluted potboiler that remixes ingredients from the author's previous efforts and tosses them all into a near-incomprehensible stew of corruption, guilt, deception and murder. You've seen it all before in different (but somehow the same) incarnations. 

Fool Me Once stars Michelle Keegan as Maya Stern, a disgraced British military pilot whose husband, Joe (Netflix regular Richard Armitage), is shot dead in the street just months after her sister was killed in an apparent burglary gone wrong. Aside from the two murders, Maya is already carrying plenty of baggage from her recent past, compounding both her grief and PTSD. Shortly after her husband's funeral, Maya finds shocking new footage on her nanny-cam showing Joe, apparently alive and inside their home, cuddling his toddler daughter. How can this be? she wonders. Joe died in her arms. She watched them bury him! 

When her daughter's nanny objects to Maya's rather aggressive interrogation techniques, the nanny surprises her by delivering a jolt of pepper spray to her eyes. The nanny then flees, taking the surveillance camera's SD card  with her.  Is Joe--somehow--really alive? Could he have faked his own death? And what is the nanny's involvement in this unnerving discovery? Why did she take the SD card? Is she part of some bigger conspiracy involving her late husband's uber-rich family and their vast pharmaceutical empire? Or is Maya losing her mind? In customary Coben fashion, things rapidly get weirder and more mysterioso, prompting our heroine to conduct her own investigation into the deaths of her loved ones. Of no help whatsoever is the local police detective (Adeel Akhtar) tasked with solving Joe's murder. In fact, this character is so beset by misfortune that he needs his own miniseries just to deal with his shit. Adding insult to injury, he is also every shlumpy, irascible, recovering alcoholic loner of a cop that has ever shown up onscreen or on the page in the past 60 years: he's a complete stereotype. So, this guy, this sad, decrepit cop, already suspicious of Maya's recent actions, decides she must be guilty of something and sets out with his over-eager, younger partner (another stereotype) to prove it. Meanwhile, Maya's covert inquiries place her in ever-deeper jeopardy. 

Of course, there's no shortage of murder suspects: the husband of Maya's dead sister (Marcus Garvey), Maya's military/civilian wingman (Emmett J. Scanlan), Joe's psychiatrist mother (a devious Joanna Lumley) and siblings (Hattie Morahan, James Northcote), a reclusive whistleblower (Laurie Kynaston), an abusive soccer coach (Craige Els) and his thuggish son, the pepper-spray wielding nanny (Natalia Kostrzewa) and her boyfriend, a long-lost illegitimate son. And on and on and on. There are so many red-herrings, so many characters coming and going, and so much of it comes to naught: it's simply padding to stretch out the overworn premise to 8 episodes. 

Frankly, I was pretty much over this endless charade well before the infuriating ending, which, I have to admit, was something I didn't see coming. It is, perhaps, the only thing in this misbegotten adaptation that feels, in any way, original, albeit not in a good way. Michelle Keegan is gorgeous and totally unconvincing as the tough-as-nails ex-military fighter, although the scriptwriters aren't really interested in developing a lead character that is believably human. Even less believable is Adeel Akhtar's unfortunate DS Kierce, but since I panned him elsewhere in this post, I won't flog a dead horse. Joanna Lumley, on the other hand, serves grande dame attitude and chews every bit of scenery with relish: if she had a mustache, she'd undoubtedly be twirling it like a silent movie villain. I did like Dino Fetscher as the younger police detective, although I'm not sure whether it's because he delivered a solid performance or if I just enjoyed looking at him. Ditto for Emmett Scanlan, who is all shifty-eyed and slinky as Maya's best mate, Shane. I must say that I appreciated the down-to-earth performances of the actors playing Maya's extended family, although, after considerable build-up, the kids seem to get tossed aside in the show's final hour. Another dead-end you thought was leading somewhere. 

The needless (and dumb) epilogue that is tacked on to the regrettable ending had me rolling my eyes and wondering WTF? No, seriously, WTF? Not just what the fuck but why the fuck? In truth, WTF is a fitting and succinct final assessment of this entire enterprise. Will this keep me from watching any future Netflix adaptations of Harlan Coben's labors? God, I hope so, but most probably not. Sometimes you just need to turn off your brain and be transfixed by trash TV. And as bad as it is, Fool Me Once fits the bill: it moves along briskly and is never dull, and that's about the highest praise I can give it. 

And here's a photo of actor and former Mr. Gay UK winner, Dino Fetscher. You're welcome.