This was my favorite thriller of the summer! The concept is fun a little nuts. An out of work actor takes a job as plant for a private investigator, getting paid under the table as a Brit without a green card to snare straying husbands. This works fine for awhile until a wife of a client is murdered and the husband is the primary suspect. The police enlist her to work for them to gather evidence against him. But, they fall in love. Allow yourself to suspend disbelief and just go along with it. It's a fun ride. Trust no one.

Thanks to NetGalley, Ballantine Books, and JP Delaney for the opportunity to read and review her latest book. I was a big fan of The Girl Before and this was another twisty tale.

The title is very appropriate for this book - you have no clue who to believe in this book. Claire is an actress in New York without a green card and desperate for money. She works for a lawyer as a decoy trying to catch husbands in the act of hiring a prostitute. When one of the clients is found murdered, Claire finds herself working for the police to try to trip the husband into confessing. But soon, you begin to wonder just who is trying to catch who and just who you can believe.

I was less enthralled with the poetry sprinkled throughout (about S&M practices) even though that was a key element throughout the story. Some of the dialogue is written in the form of a screenplay, which was interesting because of the acting angle.

So very many twists and turns in this book - just when you think you have it figured out, you don't! A good read.

*3.5 stars rounded up. Can there be too many plot twists? Perhaps. This story is very convoluted. It is told from Claire Wright's first person point of view and she is a most unreliable narrator! A twenty-five-year-old English actress, she is trying to get a fresh start in NYC theatre but needs her green card to get work. So in the meantime, she is taking acting classes and working for a detective agency getting dirt on cheating husbands.

When the wife of the latest philanderer they are investigating is found dead in her hotel room, Claire is suspected because the woman has also been robbed of a great deal of cash and everyone knows Claire is in dire need of money.

But it seems the police really think the husband, Professor Patrick Folger, is the perp and enlist Claire's aid, with her excellent skills at flirtation, to get him to admit it. Buckle your seatbelts from this point on because there are lots of hairpin turns ahead.

A really fast read: I believe it could be gulped down in one long, relaxed day of reading. Claire is not especially likable but she does grow as a person by the end of the story--something I always like to see.

I received an arc of this new thriller from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest review. Many thanks!

I’m usually all for psychological thrillers but this one didn’t keep me interested as much as I thought it would. The beginning started out awesome and I really thought this would be a great book.

It starts out with Claire who is a struggling actor with a troubled past. What really got me at the beginning was that this is a book about a serial killer! I love true crime so I was really looking forward to trying to solve the mystery on who the culprit was. The mind games are crazy in this one but around 86% percent of the book, it just got old. One too many twists for my liking. I actually stopped reading it and didn’t resume it until a few days later. Overall it was 3/5 ⭐️

What a awesome book! This is the first time that I’ve read J.P. Delaney but it won’t be my last time. This is a very intense story and written fantasticly. Thanks J.P.

Believe Me had more twists and turns than a roller coaster ride and was equally as thrilling and (a tad) scary. I was drawn to J.P. Delaney’s latest release primarily because I thought her previous book, The Girl Before, was a page turner based on an original concept.

I was not disappointed by this title which took on more of the psychological, and somewhat dark, side. It wasn’t without a few bumps- a couple of slow spots and an important scene that wasn’t nearly as intense as it should have been. This did not change my overall opinion but I did remove one star.

Claire is a Brit, without a green card, living in New York City. She is a struggling actress attending classes at a prestigious acting school here in the States after a bit of an unfortunate relationship with her leading man back home. To make ends meet, she works off book in the role of a decoy for a divorce lawyer. One such job lands her in the middle of a brutal murder and subsequent investigation. Woven throughout the story are connections to Charles Baudelaire, a nineteenth century French poet. Baudelaire’s work was considered scandalous to the point of being censored due to his themes of sex and death.

Believe Me will have you wondering exactly who and what to believe. Did she or didn’t she? Did he or didn’t he? Or, perhaps, the murderer was someone else?? You’ll have to read it all the way to the very end to find out.


FYI - I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book was good. Not in my top 5 for the year but a very quick read and definitely had my attention. Started off kind of slow for me but picked up. When it picked up there were twist that I did not see coming. I will share this book
As one to read.

Interesting story and characters. Excellent follow up to The Girl Before. I can’t wait to read JP Delaney’s next book.

I loved how this book started out. It was fast paced and twisty. It had lots of twists and turns but at about the three quarter mark it fell flat and I struggled with the last part. I got tired of the main character. She just kind of annoyed me after a while. I gave this three stars for the beginning and middle. I just couldn't go higher.

After reading JP Delaneys last book I knew I wanted to read more. This book did not disappoint. I loved the characters and storyline. I can not recommend this book highly enough. Fantastic read!

This review will be posted to GoodReads and my blog www.bohananbabbles.wordpress.com on July 20th.

I would like to thank Ballatine Books for access to review this Advanced Reader Copy through NetGalley! Believe Me will be released on July 24th.

My Rating: 4 stars      

Overall: Sensual, Sexy, Psychological Thriller... loved it!

A Synopsis: Claire is an aspiring actress with big dreams and a shallow wallet. She also is missing a green card, the key to landing her a role to kickstart her career. As a last ditch effort, she agrees to become a decoy for a divorce law firm. The gig strings her along, until one of the wives that hired her is brutally murdered. This sends Claire into her most dangerous role yet... a decoy to try and lure the husband into admitting he killed her. But how far will her acting have to go to make him believe that she truly cares about him? And how is she sure she isn't the one being watched as well?

My Thoughts: Believe Me is such a thrilling read! "Sexy" and "Psychological" were the words that kept popping into my head while I was reading, and I think that carried through every last page of this book. The theatrical way Believe Me was written in was absolute genius, and I loved being able to see the play "come to life" in Claire's head. I am a theater nerd myself, so this really spoke to me on a personal level. Anyone looking for something that will keep you guessing from page one NEEDS to read this book!



My Critique: I really don't have much to say in this regard. I truly enjoyed most of this book, there were just small things that I felt like could have been tweaked.

Thanks to net galley for providing me with a free copy of this book.

4.5 Stars - this book was INSANE! I finished it in one day, flying through it trying to figure out what the heck was going on.

I loved the premise of this one, definitely different than what I’ve read lately - I thought the idea of using Claire as a “decoy” was fascinating and I couldn’t imagine doing what she did in that situation!

There were so many unreliable characters, which really left me wondering what would happen next. The beginning flew for me, I’d say once I got 65% of the way through, it did seem to drag a little in the middle & I wondered how they were going to keep going with this… but the last 15- 20% of the novel had me riveted. Several twists I didn’t see coming, and I was thoroughly creeped out as the book came to an end. No spoilers, but WOW - this one was not what I expected at all and I loved how it ended, and absolutely enjoyed this one. I would definitely recommend.

Believe Me is a mystery suspense book that follows the narrator, Claire who is an aspiring British Actor stuck in a tough position of needing a job, but have no green card to work while she is attending acting school in America. The way that the narrator see the world as a script in a movie is an original way of telling the story. The fear and confidence that she has while doing work for the police is felt through the pages. This is a one-sitting suspense filled book that the reader will not want to put down because they need to know if Mr. Fogler is the killer or not. The story takes the reader on a journey between right and wrong, black and white and into the land of grey. This ARC was provided by Netgalley and Random House in exchange for an honest review.

Believe Me is a dark, sexually charged psychological thriller that kept me engrossed from the moment I picked up the book until I put it down. This was a one sitting read because I couldn’t stop turning pages to see what happened next!

Claire is a young British actress in New York running from a tawdry past back home. She’s an excellent actress attending college on a scholarship but there’s one problem: she has no green card, which means her chances of getting acting jobs are almost nil.

She’s broke and will do almost anything for work, so she puts her gifted acting skills to use pretending to be a high priced hooker for a divorce law firm so she can entrap cheating husbands for their suspicious wives. Claire is excellent at her job until the night she’s hired by Stella Fogler to entrap her husband Patrick, a Columbia University professor well-known for his translations (and obsessions) of 19th-century poet Charles Baudelaire’s book of sexual and controversial poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). Patrick doesn’t take the bait but only talks to Claire of Baudelaire’s poetry. When Claire tells his wife he didn’t accept her advances, Stella appears agitated and frightened…that night she’s brutally murdered.

Patrick is the main suspect in his wife’s murder but there’s more: the police believe he’s a serial killer inspired to murder women by Baudelaire’s darkest, most deviant poems about sex and death. Claire is given the role of her life when she’s sent undercover by the police to get a confession from Patrick. She throws herself wholeheartedly into her role, falling deeply into his darkness to lure him into her trap.

I loved the format of how Claire would relay the story at times as if she were narrating it as a play; it gave a lot of impact to her egotistic desire to be the center of attention and showcased not only her acting skills but enhanced her unreliability as a narrator. It made you ask, who really is Claire? The young actress the reader met at the beginning? Or the one who was pulled into the darkness? Regardless, Claire is a wonderful protagonist while being the ultimate unreliable narrator.

The story is quite twisted and throws the reader off balance several times. You definitely have to suspend your belief with this book but Delaney has written a highly entertaining and fast-paced novel! There are so many twists in this book that I was left guessing several times. I thought I had figured things out but I was wrong!

As a literature major who studied Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal as a graduate student I thoroughly enjoyed the premise of the murders revolving around Baudelaire’s poems since he is one of the major influencers of French literature and worldwide modern writings as we know it, going as far as influencing major 20th century writers, music artists from Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, the Stones song Sympathy with the Devil, and much more. His poems about sex, death, and perversion were certainly scandalous in their day and still are a little over the top for some, yet they made for a brilliant plot device for a deviant serial killer to inspire and stage his murders. Kudos to Delaney for the originality of his premise!

While I enjoyed the author’s first book, The Girl Before, Delaney has raised the bar with this latest novel. I highly recommend it for some mind-twisting thrills…who is the real sociopath in this game of deception? Who is the prey? You don’t want to miss this suspenseful novel this summer!

**Thank you NetGalley and Ballantine Books for ARC in exchange for my fair and honest review.**

I loved Claire, and the cat and mouse nature of this story. Such interesting twists and turns, and enough drama to keep me dreaming. I loved the stories of Claire's work more than the murder mystery, but together, it was a four star book! Enjoyed it so much!

While I totally loved Delaney’s debut, The Girl Before it had mixed reviews among my Goodreads friends and one of the biggest complaints was that the entire story didn’t seem plausible. I’m generally not bothered by that, I read fiction because the idea of something far fetched happening intrigues me to no end, so I ended up on the love it side of the fence. This time around I wasn’t as pleased, I didn’t actively dislike Believe Me but I definitely did not enjoy it as much as TGB and I think it’ll be another polarizing read.

Claire is a typical psychological thriller narrator, her reliability is questionable and she’s extremely interesting because of it. She’s broke and new to NYC and desperately wants to stay, she has no desire to go back home to London so when she gets an opportunity to make some fast cash as a decoy she happily accepts. I never really liked her as a character but she did fascinate me, her motivation wasn’t clear and she definitely kept me guessing. There was a sense of the same addictive writing style here as in TGB and I definitely was curious about how things would end, but I wasn’t even half as invested which is troubling.

I found the premise to be somewhat believable but the things that followed were outrageous and wild. I really don’t want to spoil anything but everything from the decisions that Claire made to the outlandish directions Delaney took the story left me pretty unsatisfied. It was one of those books that got worse as I got further along instead of better and I just couldn’t muster up any excitement in the end. If you don’t mind suspending all disbelief while reading then maybe this will work better for you though as it is really well written and a pretty fast read.

Thanks to netgalley.com for this ARC.

I really had fun with this book. It was suspenseful and had some interesting and unexpected twists. I really didn't know where the story was going at times.
While parts were a little unbelievable the story was captivating and kept you reading. I finished the story in one day and could have kept reading more.

The narrator was completely unreliable and the rest of the characters not very nice but tat added to the story.

I'm glad I was given the opportunity to read this one!

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.

I found this novel very difficult to get through. The premise is simple: Claire Rodenburg is a struggling Brit in America, with no visa, no money, and on the verge of getting kicked out of the apartment she shares with an aspiring actress. To try to make ends meet, she pretends to hit on married men to help their wives catch them in the act. Unfortunately, it goes too far one time. Suddenly she is a decoy in a murder investigation, falling for the alleged perpetrator accused of murdering his wife. The premise is interesting but this novel never quite managed to pull me in. For instance, the constant breaking into the way a scene is written in a script was very distracting. Another was Claire falling for Patrick, the alleged perpetrator. After 51% I had to shelve it.

It took me awhile to get into this book but once I got into it the story itreally had me hooked. A young actress in school hoping to get a part that will change her life finds herself working with the police to catch a killer. This assignment really tests her acting skills and gives her a role she will never forget. Is she really acting or is this who she really is? Read the book to find out.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book.