In Harlan Coben’s thriller Fool Me Once, ex-military pilot and single mom Maya Stern (Michelle Keegan) will do anything and everything to get to the bottom of her husband’s and sister’s murders. And with the powerful Burkett family’s history of silencing dissenters, she doesn’t have much time left. The series is jam-packed with twists and turns — just about anyone could be the killer. Is Maya’s army buddy Shane (Emmett J. Scanlan) the culprit? What about whistleblower Corey (Laurie Kynaston)? Hey, maybe it’s that random guy named Rambo (Connor Porter) who was there when Joe died. Read on to find out the answers to your burning questions about the series.
To find out more about the cast and characters, check out this guide.
Joanna Lumley as Judith Burkett in Fool Me Once
Tommy Dark runs a security firm. He’s a former marine who was paid by the Burkett family every month for 26 years. Why? Because he was a captain on the yacht the night Maya’s brother-in-law, Andrew Burkett, died in 1996. Maya’s husband, Joe Burkett (Richard Armitage), insisted that Andrew’s death was a suicide. But when Maya catches up with Joe’s former friend and classmate Christopher Swain, she finds out the truth: Joe shoved Andrew off the boat to his death to ensure that he’d stay silent about the death of their other classmate, Theo Mora. Theo died from alcohol poisoning in a hazing incident in which Joe was the primary instigator. This brings us back to Tommy: In the present, he goes missing, and Maya and Corey the Whistle trace his whereabouts to a storage unit. In it, they find Tommy dead, his throat slashed and his body stashed in a large cooler. Joe killed him and used Maya’s car to transport the body — which later gives Detective Sami Kierce (Adeel Akhtar) and his partner, Marty McGreggor (Dino Fetscher), reason to suspect her of Tommy’s death.
Richard Armitage as Joe Burkett in Fool Me Once
Joe’s mom, Judith Burkett (Joanna Lumley), ordered two of her household staffers, Izabella (Natalia Kostrzewa) and Luka (Frederick Szkoda), to create a deepfake of Joe. They used a video from Maya and Joe’s wedding, then superimposed his image onto the footage. Why? Judith suspected Maya was lying about Joe’s death and wanted to rattle Maya so she’d slip up and admit the truth.
Joe killed Maya’s sister, Claire (Natalie Anderson). Claire, who worked at Burkett Pharmaceuticals, started to catch on to the company’s crimes: They were falsifying drug trials and putting bad drugs on the market that made people sick, and worse. She reached out to Corey the Whistle, who’d reported on Maya’s war crimes. (Maya had killed innocent civilians in an effort to save her fellow comrades from enemy soldiers.) Claire persuaded Corey not to release the damning audio from the incident, and in the process, she and Corey unraveled the Burketts’ secrets — including that Joe had previously killed Theo and Andrew. Joe, who was also Claire’s colleague, caught on and killed her, staging it as a robbery.
Alexander Dosman (Joe Armstrong) is Claire’s ex-boyfriend. The two were together before Claire and Eddie (Marcus Garvey) had their children, Abby (Danya Griver) and Daniel (Daniel Burt). It turns out that Daniel took a DNA test a while back, which revealed his unidentified half-sibling. Through some sleuthing, Abby and Daniel find out who their half-sibling’s birth father is: Alexander. But when Abby shows up at Alexander’s apartment to confront him, he has no clue he’s a father to their half-sibling, Louis (Charlie Cain), the assistant coach for Abby’s soccer team.
At the end of the series, Sami finds out that Rambo, a thief who was in the park at the time of Joe’s death, saw Maya shoot Joe. Maya had killed Joe after finding out the truth about Claire’s death. She told her husband to meet her at their spot in the park, pressed him about what he did, then shot him. Maya used the same gun that Joe used to kill Claire, and she told the police that Joe was shot in a mugging by two men who were in the area at the time — Rambo and PJ, the local soccer coach’s son. The identical bullets from the two murders, along with Rambo’s admission that he witnessed the shooting, is what led to Maya’s arrest.
Michelle Keegan as Maya Stern in Fool Me Once
Yes. After Sami finds out that Maya was Joe’s killer, Maya reveals the truth about her desperate attempts to get justice against Joe and his family. Sami, who’s just recently figured out that his blackouts and brain damage were caused by drugs from Burkett Pharmaceuticals, decides to work with confessed murderer Maya to expose Judith Burkett and the rest of the Burkett family. Sami, Maya, and Corey set up a nanny cam and a livestream, then Maya posts up in the Burkett family home. Judith and her children, Joe’s siblings Neil (James Northcote) and Caroline (Hattie Morahan), walk in to find Maya in their home. Maya tells the Burketts that she knows they’ve been silencing people for years regarding the pharma scandal, and that Joe killed his brother Andrew. Then, Judith suggests she and Maya cover up Joe’s murder so that the family secrets stay secret — but Maya refuses. Moments later, Neil (James Northcote), the Burkett CEO, takes Maya’s gun and kills her. And all of it’s been live-streamed for the world to see.
Adeel Akhtar as Detective Sergeant Sami Kierce and Dino Fetscher as Marty McGreggor in Fool Me Once
The series fast-forwards 18 years in the future, where Sami and Eddie meet at the hospital to visit Lily, Maya’s daughter. Lily’s all grown up and has just had a baby of her own, who she’s named Maya.
It’s not likely. The series spans the entirety of Coben’s novel, and the book doesn’t have a sequel.
