Believe Me: A Novel

JP Delaney

Jul 2018 · Sold by Ballantine Books

About this eBook

In this twisty psychological thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Before, an actress plays both sides of a murder investigation.
 
“[A] rich, nuanced, highly literary take on the Gone Girl theme.”—Booklist (starred review)
 
Claire Wright is desperate. A British drama student in New York without a green card, she takes the only job she can get: working for a firm of divorce lawyers, posing as an easy pickup in hotel bars to entrap straying husbands. But then the game changes. 
 
When one of her targets becomes the suspect in a murder investigation, the police ask Claire to use her acting chops to lure him into a confession. From the start, she questions the part she’s being asked to play: Is Patrick Fogler a killer? Or is there more to this setup than she’s being told?
 
Claire will soon realize she is playing the deadliest role of her life. 
 
Praise for Believe Me
 
“For readers who enjoyed the paranoia factor in A. J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window or the unreliable narrator of Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train.”—Library Journal
 
“Produces a bobsled run’s worth of twists.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“An intense, stylish psychological thriller.”—Good Housekeeping
 
“A dark and haunting thriller . . . A superb evocation of conflicted emotions, this never lets you guess what’s coming next.”—Daily Mail
 
“I so enjoyed it—what a twisty, exciting read.”—Sabine Durrant, author of Lie With Me

Ratings and reviews

An unreliable narrator, a storyline that is both twisted and twisty, and a cat and mouse game that you're never quite sure of who's the cat. All of these should've made for an intense and exciting psychological thriller, except it didn't. Part of that can be attributed to the many times the story is written like a script, including stage directions. Not the whole book, but quite a lot of it. I get it, our narrator is an actress who fully immerses herself into her role, but the back and forth between novel and script was distracting and for me, a nuisance. Nevertheless, the story manages to hold its own for awhile. The premise, while intriguing, is completely unrealistic, but this is fiction, so I kept going. About the halfway mark, it starts going downhill and not only becomes somewhat confusing at times, but becomes more and more unbelievable until the conclusion, which threw it way past unrealistic and into the realm of ludicrous. A dark story with lots of twists and packed full of unreliable characters is usually something I can get behind, but in the end, the cons far outweighed the pros on this one.

3 stars Review by Nancy Late Night Reviewer Up All Night w/ Books Blog Believe Me by J.P. Delaney was deviant and complex. A thriller with a lot of twists and turns. Claire is a struggling actress looking for a job, limited due to her immigration status. When the opportunity for a cash paying job arises, she takes it. She is a decoy for a group of divorce attorneys, her job is to entice married men into cheating on their spouse, to prove that they are in fact cheaters. When the wife of a suspected cheating husband turns up dead, she is given the opportunity to help the police capture the murderer. In exchange for a green card, she is to go undercover and find out if the husband was indeed the one to commit the crime. Claire was out to do a job, but in the process started having feelings for Patrick, who is believed to be the murderer, or at least that was my take on it. Claire could have been acting the entire time and it just seemed like her feelings were real, but it could have all been a lie. Although the point was to find the murderer, you get sidetracked by the relationship that starts up between Claire and Patrick. It is interesting to say the least. This book was full of twists and turns, at times it was a little hard to follow. It was deceiving until the very last page. As a reader you don’t know what is real, and what is not. I feel like it ended and we still didn’t get any real answers. Definitely not the ending I was expecting, nonetheless J.P. Delaney delivered a well written suspenseful thriller.

I really wanted to love this book I mean it is unique and a great idea. It wasn't that it was bad I just found myself wanting it to be done. The is a lot of deceit and back and forth and who is lying and twisted things that usually draw me in and hook me but for some reason this didn't do it for me. I am not in the habit of writing bad reviews and it's really not that the writing was bad it just didn't work for me.

About the author

The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Before and Believe Me, JP Delaney has previously written fiction under other names.