Sarah Nade
A Hawaiian punk singer with a voice that shatters glass, and the best-known new face of the Deluxe Edition's expanded rogues' gallery.
Sarah Nade leads a double life. By day, per her Deluxe Edition dossier, she teaches piano and ocarina to fifth-graders in Hanapepe, on the island of Kauai. By night she fronts a Hawaiian Island punk band called The Sarcastic Fringeheads, and her voice “shatters glass” — a talent she has put to convenient use for breaking-and-entering. It is one of the more elaborate premises handed to any single suspect in the roster: most of the other nineteen villains get one criminal specialty, and Sarah gets a music career built around hers.
On the lam
Sarah has spent much of her life skin diving off the Hawaiian coast, hunting exotic coral, tropical fish and a bass player for her band. Currently on the run, she funds a stretch limousine off the royalties from the Fringeheads’ hit single “You’re My Honey Lamb (Shish-kabob, Shish-kabob)” and mounts a satellite dish on the roof so she never misses a soap opera — a habit that repeatedly bungles her assignments, since she keeps stopping heists to catch an episode. Her dossier records blond hair, gray eyes, and a scar below her right ear shaped like the state of New Jersey. Even her getaway vehicle is played for the joke: a limousine kitted out less for a quick escape than for watching television in comfort while the law catches up.
In the games
Sarah Nade was new to the Deluxe Edition’s twenty-villain roster, one of ten characters who had no counterpart in the original 1985 game. Her getaway vehicle is a limousine, matching the flashy, media-soaked profile the manual gives her, and her file sits in the Dataminder’s DOSSIER mode alongside the other nine newcomers, credited in-story to the informant “Anna Ijo.”
Why she stands out
Of the ten new Deluxe recruits, Sarah Nade is the one most often singled out in write-ups of the roster, and it is easy to see why: her file is one of the more elaborate character sketches in the whole gallery, with a working band name, a real hit-song title, and a running joke about soap operas costing her heists — more incidental plot than most of the roster gets. She is a useful entry point for the full twenty-villain roster for exactly that reason, and for how differently the Deluxe writers approached a brand-new character compared with reusing a 1985 original like Fast Eddie B.