65 pages • 2-hour read
Nobody's Fool
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Prologue-Chapter 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use, death, addiction, and antigay bias.
Prologue Summary
Former police detective Sami Kierce recalls his vacation to Spain’s Costa del Sol region following his college graduation. Sami addresses his recollections to Anna, the beautiful young woman he met at a club. Sami was travelling with his college roommate, Quinn, and Quinn’s lacrosse team. Sami locked eyes with Anna on the dance floor and boldly approached her. After dancing together, Sami left for Anna’s apartment. They had sex and spent the next two days together. Not wanting to leave Anna, Sami stayed behind while Quinn and the team continued their travels. Sami wonders how different his life would be if he had gone with his friends.
Sami moved out of his hostel into Anna’s apartment after five days, and the couple drank, partied, and used drugs daily. Sami questions Anna’s unusual life in Spain, since the only other person she spoke to was her drug dealer, Buzz. Sami can’t remember his final night out with Anna, but the next morning, he saw her covered in blood, and he was holding a bloody knife.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Twenty-Two Years Later”
Twenty-two years later, Sami disguises himself as an unhoused person to take pictures of license plates near a strip club. Sami lies in wait for his target, Peyton Booth, whose wife wants to catch him cheating. Sami works for the law firm Whit Shaw—which he calls White Shoe—for free in exchange for legal representation in a lawsuit. In Sami’s last official investigation as an NYPD detective, a witness, PJ Dawson, fell off a roof and sustained critical injuries, and the Dawson family is suing Sami for misconduct. Sami employs a young, unhoused woman, Debbie, to help track Peyton’s movements in and out of the club with code words.
As Sami waits for Debbie’s cue, Debbie’s friend Raymond approaches and asks after her. Raymond shares his theory that airplanes fly with the help of invisible witches, which he claims is a government conspiracy. Sami suddenly hears Debbie’s code and focuses his camera on the club’s door. Peyton climbs into his car and kisses another man who also left the club. Sami informs his attorney/boss Arthur that he’s on Peyton’s trail.
Chapter 2 Summary
Later that day, Sami teaches a criminology class in the Lower East Side’s Academy Night Adult School. Including Debbie and Raymond, the class has 23 students from a wide variety of backgrounds: Three elderly ladies nicknamed the Pink Panthers are amateur detectives; three younger women have a true crime podcast called Three Dead Hots; and others like Golfer Gary and Leisure Suit Lenny have a general interest in true crime. Halfway through the class, Lenny does a show-and-tell of his tracking device collection. Lenny describes the devices’ different qualities, and the three young women interrupt with questions about whether Lenny uses the devices for stalking.
Sami stops the off-topic conversation, and when he faces the class, he sees a new student who looks exactly like Anna. Sami has hallucinated before—like when his defective prescription drug induced hallucinations about his murdered fiancée, Nicole—but unlike those hallucinations, Anna looks real. The woman sees Sami’s attention on her and flees the room. Sami runs after the woman and follows her downstairs to the door. Before she exits, Sami grabs her arm. She screams, and when Sami sees her face, he’s sure the woman is Anna. The school’s owner, Chilton, hears the commotion, and Anna slips away during the distraction—but not before Sami drops one of Lenny’s trackers into her pocket. Chilton warns Sami not to cause trouble. Sami returns to his classroom and gets Lenny to help him download the GPS tracking app.
Chapter 3 Summary
Sami takes the subway to his friend Craig’s house to pick up his car and follows the tracker through Manhattan and out to Connecticut. Sami’s wife Molly calls, and he evades her questions about his whereabouts. Sami hasn’t told anyone except his father about the summer in Spain, but he promises to explain everything to Molly in person. Molly and Sami recently had a son together, so Sami has been working on being less secretive.
As Sami drives, his mind races with theories about Anna. He remembers reporting Anna’s death to the Spanish detective Carlos Osorio, though he concealed information that would have implicated him in her murder. The tracker moves into a wealthy neighborhood, and the GPS has Anna’s destination blurred out. Sami drives slowly past the house and sees a large iron gate at the driveway. Sami pulls over down the road, leaves his car, and walks into the woods that surround the estate.
Sami tramps blindly through the darkness until he can see the house and Anna walking past a window. As Sami considers his next move, he hears dogs rapidly approaching. He runs, but the dogs quickly catch up and knock him down. Two men approach, and the larger man pulls a gun. The men look Sami up online and learn that he’s connected to the botched Burkett case and that all his prior investigations are being reopened. The man with the gun, whom Sami dubs “Gun Guy,” punches Sami and threatens to shoot him. Sami opens his phone to a FaceTime call and claims the NYPD on the other end just heard the men’s threats.
Chapter 4 Summary
The men escort Sami back to his car and refuse to answer his questions. Sami thanks Craig, who was on the FaceTime call and heard nothing. Sami sends the house’s location to Marty, his former partner, to investigate. He drops the car back at Craig’s house and takes the subway home. Sami creeps into the house, peeks at his sleeping son Henry, and slips into bed next to Molly. Sami is overwhelmed with love for his family.
A call from Arthur wakes Sami in the early morning. Arthur reminds Sami that he needs to prepare the photos of Peyton Booth before their meeting later. Arthur also informs Sami that Tad Grayson, the convicted murderer of Nicole, will be released from prison in an hour. Three of Sami’s convicted cases have been overturned since activists pushed to re-investigate them for malpractice. Judith and Caroline Burkett, guilty in Sami’s last case, were also released on bail. Sami wants to watch Tad’s release, and he promises to explain everything to Molly when he returns.
Chapter 5 Summary
Sami stands away from the news vans gathered at the prison. After decades behind bars, Tad looks worn down, which pleases Sami. Marty appears, wanting to keep an eye on Sami so he doesn’t do anything impulsive. Tad’s lawyer, Kelly Neumeier, speaks about righting an injustice, but Sami knows the investigation was clean. Tad then thanks his lawyers and professes his unwavering innocence. Kelley prevents Tad from answering questions and whisks him away. Marty questions what Sami was doing on a private property in the middle of the night, but Sami evades him with sarcasm and humor. All Marty learned was that an LLC owns the property. Sami doesn’t think Anna’s reappearance and Tad’s release are connected, but he finds the timing curious. Sami gets an urgent text from Arthur, so he gets a ride into town with Marty.
Chapter 6 Summary
Marty talks enthusiastically about his new workout class as he drives Sami into town. He drops Sami off blocks away from the Whit Shaw office, and Sami dons a fake FedEx uniform. He waits for Peyton Booth and hand-delivers the photos and a secret message asking to meet. Sami follows Peyton into the office’s bathroom. He locks the door and explains that Peyton’s wife Courtney hired him to catch Peyton breaking their prenup’s infidelity clause. Peyton offers Sami $100,000 to keep quiet, but Sami says he’ll destroy the photos for no charge if Peyton agrees to dissolve the prenup. Sami doesn’t want to out Peyton as gay, but he wants to complete the job he was hired for.
Sami watches the quick divorce mediation. Despite Peyton caving quickly, Courtney Booth is unhappy. She wants to know who Peyton was cheating on her with, and Sami accidentally agrees to send her the photos. Arthur and Sami discuss Tad Grayson’s release. His lawyer, Kelly Neumeier, works in Arthur’s office. Tad’s charge wasn’t overturned, so the District Attorney can still retry the case, but Sami knows there isn’t enough evidence left to convict Tad. Sami leaves without taking Courtney’s email address, having no intention of sending her the photos.
Prologue-Chapter 6 Analysis
Sami Kierce is the protagonist and narrator of Nobody’s Fool, and his lively narrative style highlights key aspects of his personality. Sami is sarcastic and ironic, and he infuses his narration with humor to make light of serious situations. For example, when Sami alludes to the murder of his fiancée, Nicole, he dryly jokes with the reader when he says, “I guess I’m not safe to date, ladies” (19). Marty claims Sami uses his humor as a defense mechanism so he doesn’t have to feel his true emotions, but despite his wit, Sami is a reliable narrator who discusses his sometimes unflattering thoughts and behaviors candidly. For example, when Sami first sees Tad Grayson, he admits to the reader that a horrible thought crossed his mind: “It is so awful and self-centered I am afraid to say it here, but I can’t help it: If Tad Grayson hadn’t murdered Nicole, my son, Henry, would have never been born” (46). Sami also frequently addresses his narration to “you.” In the Prologue, this “you” is Anna, and in the main narrative, the “you” is the reader. In both cases, the use of “you” gives the narration a conversational quality, as if Sami is sharing a story with a friend. When he addresses Anna as “you,” the text evokes an additional pathos, as Sami is trying to speak to Anna in the afterlife.
These initial chapters introduce a major theme in the text, The Importance of Confronting Past Trauma, through several key relationships in Sami’s past. The story’s central mystery concerns Anna, whom Sami thought he had killed in Spain 22 years ago until her mysterious reappearance in Chapter 2. In the Prologue, Sami hints about how his brief relationship with Anna has stayed present in his mind even after all this time: “The DJ was blasting ‘Can’t Get You out of My Head’ by Kylie Minogue, which, man oh man, would end up being the most on-the-nose tune imaginable” (1). The close of the relationship was so traumatic that it changed the course of Sami’s life, leading him to drop out of medical school and eventually to join the police force. More recently, the murder of Sami’s first fiancée, Nicole, led to similar trauma. Sami used to hallucinate seeing and speaking with Nicole after her death, as his mind subconsciously sought her out for comfort in troubling times. When Sami thinks he sees Anna, he initially believes his mind is falsely conjuring her up as it once did Nicole. When Nicole’s killer, Tad Grayson, is released from prison a day after Sami’s Anna sighting, it becomes clear to him that he can no longer run from these past traumas.
Sami’s fall from grace at the NYPD, together with the odd jobs he must perform to replace his lost income, highlights the motif of wealth inequality, which colors life in the text and determines how characters move through their world. Sami spends much of his time working as an unpaid private investigator in exchange for legal representation, and his main income stream is through the pay-as-you-go night school where he teaches criminology, as well as occasional attempts to blackmail people who visit strip clubs. Sami’s financial desperation makes him take jobs that are below his usual pay grade or even outright illegal so he can keep the lights on at home. He expresses his feelings toward his financial and ethical predicament when he simply states, “Yeah, times are tough” (9). The text emphasizes how Sami is constantly thinking about money in his movements through the city. For example, when he follows Anna out to Connecticut, he mentions the growing wealth of the neighborhoods and self-deprecatingly highlights how out of place he feels: “My old clunker of a car fits into these wealthy environs like a cigarette in a health club” (28). Sami sees people living comfortably around him and desires that for his family. This desire motivates many of his decisions throughout the text.
The first chapters also introduce The Tension Between Legal and Personal Justice through the text’s two intersecting mysteries. In the case of Tad Grayson, Sami received both legal and personal justice for his fiancée’s murder when Tad was put in prison for life. However, Sami’s mistakes in the Burkett case mean that all his past convictions are being reinvestigated. Though Sami is personally certain of Tad’s guilt, this personal certainty is not enough to ensure justice in the legal system. Sami tries to hold onto feelings of personal justice during Tad’s release by taking pleasure in Tad’s evident physical deterioration: “My hate is still fresh, raw, but I would be lying if I didn’t say it felt a bit tempered because Tad Grayson looked so broken” (44). Tad’s case can still be re-tried, but Sami doubts there’s enough evidence for a new conviction, so his hopes of renewed legal justice are limited. In Anna’s case, Sami immediately desires personal justice in the form of answers for the wrong done to him. Sami is willing to do whatever is necessary to get these answers. Sami doesn’t yet know that he was the victim of a scam, but he immediately understands from Anna’s reappearance that a wrong was committed against him 22 years ago, and he wants some form of reckoning for it.
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