Whitcoulls Recommends: Nobody’s Fool and Northbound

Nobody’s Fool by Harlan Coben. A former detective turned private investigator is stunned when the woman he thought had died 22 years ago suddenly appears in the back of a lecture he’s giving, and as soon as they make eye contact, disappears. Her death has haunted him all these years but the possibility she could still be alive has never occurred to him – and now he needs to track her down and find out the truth. From the pen (or the keyboard!) of a terrific and well established thriller writer.

Northbound by Naomi Arnold. Naomi is a local journalist who decided to walk the entire length of the Te Araroa trail on her own. There have been books from other people about taking on that challenge, but hers is a really gritty, no holds barred account of the slog of it – the mud, the fear, the loneliness and the exhilaration of achieving something so momentous, all by herself. It’s clear there’s a very caring network on the trail even though the walkers pass one another like ships in the night. There’s also a lot of kindness from people around who keep an eye out on them and offer food and support. This book is a lovesong to the trail and the NZ outdoors; and to the power of communities. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News talks'b Books with Wiggles for the best selection
of great.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Reads, and Joe McKenzie joins me. Now, good morning, good morning. Hey.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
I must say.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
I've just finished reading Sarah win Williams's Careless People, her
tale of working for Facebook, now known as Meta. What
a great yarn.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
It is extraordinary, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
It really is a fabulous yarn. And we talked about
the fact that we couldn't get her on the show.
She was banned from doing publicity. But people can still
buy the book.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
You know, the book wasn't banned or or forced not
to sell it. It was just that she's been muzzled
and she's not allowed to talk publicly about it.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah. No, I'm hearing a lot of people talk about it.
So you can you can pick that book up right.
What have you got for us today?

Speaker 3 (00:58):
The fiction today is by Harlan Coben, who will be
known to a lot of readers, particularly thriller readers, and
this is called Nobody's Fall, which is the second in
a series featuring a retired cop called Sammy Kias who's
had a pretty rough time. His fiance was murdered in
the Killers in prison, and Sammy's now happily married with
a son, but he's got debts to pay and he's

(01:18):
working as a pretty low level private investigator, and that
stint involves teaching a night class of wannabe private investigators,
and one night a woman turns up in the back
of the class, and strangely, after twenty two years, he
recognizes her and it takes him back to a trip
he made to Spain when he was a young man
and he met a woman named Anna. They had a

(01:39):
fling which ended really badly when he woke up one
morning to find her dead beside him is in the
back of the classroom, So how can that be Well,
of course, he then starts this game of cat and mouse,
trying to figure out exactly not only who she is
and what happened, but what's happened in all of these
years intervening, and how can it possibly be the same

(02:00):
woman when he was quite sure that she was dead
and possibly, though he couldn't recollect it, maybe he was
the murder. So while all this is going on, the
man who killed his fiance is let out of prison,
and he becomes another thing to monitor. But Sammy is
focused on how this woman her name is Anna, has
suddenly churned up, and of course he's got the skills

(02:21):
to investigate, and all the threads get pulled together in
the way that they do in really good thrillers. He's
a consistently excellent writer, I think, and it's been recognized
not just by his readers, but by Netflix I believe
have done some with them.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah. I think they're doing quite a few of his
I've watched quite a few of his novels. That is
interesting to me. He has a good premise, always has
a good premise, and I think a lot of people
might have watched his watch those Netflix shows and actually
this is probably Yeah, there are more books.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
And I think that's true of Michael Connolly as well.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
Yeah, very much. Now. Naomi Arnold has a book out
about Walking the Link of the View Zilland, which is
something which I've always said I'd like to do. Joan
when I find a moment.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
Then you should read this book because it will both
make you feel really really tired and I inspire you.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
That makes sense, That's how I felt. I expect that
she is.

Speaker 3 (03:16):
A New Zealander from Nelson. She's a journalist and also
she's been a nature writer, and you can tell that
in the way that this book has been put together.
She had this compulsion to walk the length of the
tail Row, a trail all by herself, which she set
out to do. And she decided to walk at northbound,
which is why the title is called well, it's called homebound,
but through the book she makes all these references to

(03:37):
the northbound walkers. She started in Bluff and walked up
to Cape Ranger, and of course then there's the southbound
walkers who start up the north and come south, so
she's called the book northwr And she was determined not
to cheat. She was going to walk, as she says,
every fing inch, and she was determined to make sure
so when if she had the occasional break from the

(03:59):
trail because she had work to do or for some
other reason, she would always then end up going back
to exactly the point where she'd left the trail and
start up there again and walk. And it took her
eight months and twenty three days to do the whole thing,
and in the end she walked well over three thousand
kilometers and slogging through mud and constantly wet and cold,

(04:21):
and snuggling down in sleeping bags in what sounded like
the most uncomfortable positions, and making her way slowly up
the country. It in parts it just reads like torture,
and she says, actually that it felt like that. But
then these moments of wonder come along, and she is
so momentously proud of what she's managed to achieve, and

(04:41):
so she should be, because it is quite extraordinary. I
don't think I would be fit enough to do the
whole thing, but it certainly makes me want to go
and look at parts of it.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
I think I do it in parts too, which is
cheating a little bit, but very much looking forward to
having a read of that. The book was called Northbound
Bynaomi Arnold, and our first book was Nobody's Fool by
Harlan Coben. Thank you so much, Joe, Thank you.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin. Listen
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