Having read the authors first book, I was very excited to read this one. It started out great and had my attention from the beginning. Claire is an actress who seems to be a bit "off" in her thinking and reactions. She has come over from the UK to try to pick up the pieces of her life. She finds herself in the middle of a murder and now has to decide if she is able to handle the tasks given to her by the police. I had a hard time putting this book down. It did not end as I anticipated which I loved- kudos to the author for keeping me in suspense!

3 stars for holding my attention on a long car journey from New York

This was quite a foray into a very twisty psychological thriller mode. We meet the main protagonist, Claire, who is a British actress wannabe struggling to remain in the US and attain a green card. Previously there had been a "misunderstanding" in her native country and she came to the US in search of her big break. Claire flounders, is in need on money, and accepts a position in a law firm trying to ensnare wayward husbands so their wives could find out the truth about their mates.

She gets involved in a very convoluted manner with a professor who is totally into an erotic dead poet's works and it is this professor that Claire needs to ferret out. Along the way there are some pretty intriguing plot twists and everything about both Claire and the professor becomes murky and quite dark. Opps, forgot to mention that the professor's wife was murdered.....

I enjoyed about eighty percent of the book but that ending was so unbelievable that it took away something from the enjoyment of the book. The book did have an interesting format written at times somewhat like one would expect a script to be written. So, in a nutshell while the premise kept me going this book did in the end disappoint this reader. It happens....

Thank you to J.P. Delany Random House Publishing and NetGalley for providing this reader with an advanced copy of this book.

Believe Me by J. P Delaney
Publisher : Ballentine Books
Published July 24th 2018
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Believe Me is a stunning psychological thriller that will leave you gasping for breath until the very last page! It is not very often that I can't pick up on the foreshadowing or just see right through plot twists. However, this book had me so completely engrossed that I wasn't sure what was happening until it was over.

J. P. Delaney's Believe Me takes you on a journey (or a rollercoaster that malfunctions at the top, leaving your feet dangling over the edge and scream caught in your throat before it pummels to the earth) with Claire and her quest to find the truth about a murder victim. As an actress she goes undercover for the police but finds herself so caught up in the role that it becomes hard to differentiate from what is the character she's playing and her real self.

I'm still shaking inside trying to wrap my head around how this novel played out. The writing is brilliant, the twists are shocking and the characters are well developed; everything you could ask for!

I was offered an advanced reader copy of Believe Me from netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

What is up with me and books this month where you are trying to decide if your narrator was reliable or not? Sometimes you have a hard time deciding where the acting ends and the real life begins. I am going to be honest, I had a really hard time connecting with this book. I really enjoyed The Girl Before, but this one didn’t blow me away. I didn’t care about any of the characters or what happened to them, so it took me awhile to read through this one. The writing wasn’t bad at all, so I am not sure why I couldn’t connect. The premise was really interesting though. I did enjoy the physiological aspects of the book, both in the acting classes and with the therapist who was invested in the case.

Bottom Line: This one had an interesting premise, but fell a little flat for me. I just didn’t care about any of the characters. However, it still held my interest and was well written. If you enjoyed the writing of The Girl Before, I think it is worth the read.

**I received a copy of Believe Me from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are of my own.**

Although I was not fond of The Girl Before, I wanted to give Delaney a second shot. Unfortunately, I had several of the same issues with Believe Me as I did with his other book, and had to throw in the towel at about 40%. The premise was promising, but I found the plot a bit too meandering and I was unable to suspend disbelief in many choices and relationships. I know this is a re-release of a book Delaney wrote and published prior to The Girl Before, so I hoped that it might contain fewer of the "shocking" twists and tropes common to today's thrillers, but that wasn't the case. I'm sure there's a huge audience for this book, but I'm simply not meant to be part of it.

Wow! Words cannot describe the emotions I felt as I read “Believe Me.” Having previously read Delaney’s “The Girl Before” I knew to expect to be brought through many plot twists and unexpected moments. Just when I thought I had the main character, Claire, figured out, Delaney would reveal more pieces of information that left me questioning what I had previously thought. I was enthralled from beginning to end!

This solid addition to the thriller genre is sure to please Delaney's established fans and bring in new ones. Readers who enjoyed Laura Lippman's SUNBURN will find much to like in this twisty thriller.

One thing I’ve always loved about mountains is the abundance of twisty, narrow, little roads with all those hairpin curves, winding their way up and around and up… and entirely at their own pace (well, at the pace set by those souls who originally cut, blasted, and paved the treacherous paths, in the first place,,, but you get my meaning, I’m sure).

That predilection for twisty things carries over to tales of suspense. I like to wonder what’s around the next bend… and the next page turn.

But, if mountain roads were like mazes—with endless wrong turns and wasted energies leading absolutely nowhere—I wouldn’t like them nearly so much.

The same holds true of mysteries. When an author fashions psychological twists into maddening dead ends over and over (and over) again, at some point I grow weary of following along; there has to be some sort of payoff, here and there, to maintain enough commit to follow all of that incessant winding and meandering to the end.

And, in Believe Me, author JP Delaney comes thisclose to me hurling myself off a precipice (erm, in a manner of speaking)… because those infernal switchbacks go too far, more often rendering the tale an exasperating maze than a fun ride to the mountaintop.
____________________________________

Claire is trying her best to make do… a young Brit struggling to land acting jobs in The Big Apple (made considerably harder by dint of her being all sorts of illegal, having neither a green card nor any official acting affiliations), and filling in the gaps with other, paying jobs (mostly ranging from tawdry to not-quite-as-tawdry).

One of her less-sketchy forms of employment involves a degree of acting: she works part-time for a firm whose (predominately female) clients want to find out whether or not their spouses are cheating. Claire’s job? To make herself out to be a call girl, recording any wannabe cheaters propositioning her so the wives have some solid proof to use as leverage. (Yeah, it’s kinda sleazy, but rent money is rent money.)

Things head south in a big way, though, when one of the clients ends up dead… savagely murdered in the hotel room where, just hours earlier, she’d met with Claire and Claire’s boss to get the report on her hubby Patrick.

Claire—cunning actress, beautiful enchantress, and poorer-than-a-churchmouse illegal about to lose her apartment (thus, desperate to avoid both spending any time on the streets AND being deported)—is a prime suspect, because the dead woman had also been robbed of a considerable sum of money.

Of course, the professor hubby—inheriting everything his wealthy wife left behind, and with his professional expertise in (and fondness for) the controversial, brutal works of Baudelaire—is put under the same magnifying glass.

So, when a police detective and an FBI profiler put it to Claire that she either help them determine whether or not Patrick killed his wife (and possibly a string of other women)—or find herself on a fast econojet back to London (and all the problems and troubled past she’d left behind)—Claire buckles in for the performance of her life.

But… who is really being investigated, here? Is Claire actually guilty? Is Patrick? Or is someone else—possibly in the BDSM world—behind everything? And, for that matter, who is the mysterious FBI profiler, really, and what’s her game?
____________________________________

As I said earlier, Believe Me is a tough call, because there’s certainly much to like about it. The characters are brought to vibrant life (even if we don’t know who we can trust, right down to our narrator, Claire), and behave in ways that mostly feel true to what we know or see.

I also enjoyed the frequent passages in which Claire pictures everything as a script, from the scene and setting cues to the dialogue. (It would get old very quickly if a lot of authors employed this little schtick, but here, it works quite well indeed.)

And, when the end finally comes, it does make sense… for everything we know (or realize we already knew, or already thought/suspected).

The problem for me—and this was a big one—is that Delaney uses too many false leads, obviously manipulating and willing the reader to think the wrong thing, time and time again. (Remember how I began? Twists are good, but too many wrong turns or dead ends become tiresome in a hurry.)



Bottom line? Since I really enjoyed Delaney’s earlier work, The Girl Before, I’ll be looking forward to the next tale to come from this author’s hand. As for Believe Me, the ending was worth putting up with a boatload of annoyances… but only just.

What a rollercoaster ride this was! Claire, a troubled and out of work actor, is offered a job helping with a criminal investigation. She had previously worked for a divorce attorney getting the goods on straying husbands so she was a natural to try to get close to the main suspect in a murder investigation. Claire is an unreliable narrator so you are never sure what to believe throughout the story. There were several shocking twists which keep me reading to try and sort it all out. It did have some sexual scenes and violence against women but, in the context of this twisted tale, it did not bother me. I would recommend this book.

I was pulled in right from the start of this book. With psychological thrillers being so popular currently, I feel like they are becoming very predictable. This book was not that! At certain points I felt I knew where it was going to go, only to be thrown off again. I don't want to give too much away, but this book is a must read!

I liked this book, a lot -- despite the unsympathetic, self-absorbed characters; the endemic personality disorders, and the taboo sexual practices that other reviewers have cataloged.

Believe Me is well-written, skillfully plotted and masterfully paced. Claire is a young British actress stranded in New York without a green card. This limits her options and draws her into one complicated, compromising situation after another. To pay for acting school, she moonlights as a seductress, luring and videotaping men in scenarios that their wives will later use in divorce court.

A murder of one of those wives sets up the first entanglement, when Claire is recruited by the police. Is it to entrap the husband? Or to reveal Claire as the murderer?

Among the dozen or so characters we come to know, the reader "likes"only Claire's best friend and a police detective. The rest -- lawyers, psychiatrists, agents, actors (including Claire) and friends seem unreliable and even sinister.

This story had more of an air of inevitability than The Girl Before, this author's previous book (which I also quite liked). I hope the book does well -- I recommend it!

The tension in this psychological thriller slowly builds throughout. Plot twists ratchet it up a notch, and then it simmers a while, and then it escalates again.

Claire is a struggling British actress living in New York. Her main source of income comes from working with a law firm to catch unfaithful husband's on camera, providing the video proof to the firm's client, the wife. Not quite entrapment, but pretty close to it. Her job skirts the boundary of being legal, exacerbated by the fact that she's also undocumented. So when one client Claire is working for through the firm ends up dead, she finds her world spinning out of control.

I thought the structure of this book was pretty interesting. Being an actress, Claire immerses herself in her work. She imagines her daily life as a scene in a play, constant dialogue and stage directions running through her head. Claire's character is developed through meetings with a psychologist that is working with the authorities investigating the murder. She comes to the realization that her work as a decoy, and her personal sex life, is actually her acting out her own life as a child in the foster system.

The forensic psychologist believes that the husband in this case is a sociopath, responsible for a string of unsolved murders. Although she is reluctant to have a civilian help in the dangerous investigation, the lead detective convinces her that Claire is perfect to play the part. This could be the role of a lifetime for Claire. But as the act progresses, a few plot twists come about. Claire begins to wonder if she's actually the one on the outside looking in. This one will leave you guessing hot it's going to conclude right up to the final pages.

I would recommend this book to fans of psychological thrillers and suspense. I received this as a free ARC from Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Refreshing psychological thriller. Unpredictable and utterly intriguing from start to finish. Claire is both likable and unappealing and very interesting to follow.

I thoroughly enjoyed "Believe Me" by JP Delaney. I got those book because I really liked "The Girl Before" but please note that the writing style between these two books is incredibly different.

I don't want to give too much of the plot of this book away, but in the vein of "Gone Girl" and "Girl on the Train" this books story is told through the eyes of another unreliable narrator, Claire. Additionally, Claire is an actress who oftentimes likes to imagine things playing out in her mind as if she is being directed in a movie or play. Oftentimes, this confused me as to what was "reality" and what was a "game" in her mind.

Either way, although an unreliable narrator, you come to root for Claire throughout the book - in spite of some bad decisions she makes - which keeps you reading until the end. There are also several twists throughout the book, keeping you on the edge of your seat.

Although the writing style is sometimes a little disjointed, if you are fans of the psychological thriller type of book, I think you'll really enjoy "Believe Me." If you find yourself getting stuck about halfway through, my recommendation is to keep reading. The ending totally blew me away...I am still thinking about it!

I would give this book 4/5 stars and recommend to those who enjoyed the "Gone Girl" and "Girl on the Train" type of books. It'll definitely keep you wondering and guessing...and questioning what is true and what is not!

This book messed with my head, big time. See, I liked psychological thrillers. I like reading a book where I don’t know what is going to happen from one chapter to the next. I like damaged main characters. I didn’t think that I was going to get that with Believe Me. I thought this book was going to be your typical who done it with the female main solving the crime. What I got instead was a book that kept me guessing from chapter to chapter. A book that I had a hard time forgetting about once I was done with it. A book that got under my skin. I should have known better than to assume the book was going to be a typical book.

Believe Me’s plot started off simple and progressed into complex. Claire was a British ex-pat actress living in New York City without a green card. Desperate for work, she starts doing decoy work for divorce lawyers. It is that job that puts her in the path of Professor Patrick Folger. His wife is found dead the day after the setup. Claire is brought in for questioning since she was the last person to see her alive. She is recruited by a shady psychologist to get to know Patrick and to get a confession out of him. Little does Claire know that her life is going to be turned upside down and inside out.

Claire was such a complex character to write. As a reader, I love it when characters have different layers to them. Claire definitely had them. There was one point in the book where I was questioning her memories of growing up in foster care. She was such a great actress that she made me, the reader, question what I was reading. I am sure that was the author’s intention. I loved it!!

I didn’t know how I felt about Claire. My feelings for her went from one extreme to another. I could love her in one chapter and then hate her in another. I have never had another book do that for me. Even at the end of the book, when we were seeing the “real” Claire, I was still on edge about her. I mean, was that the real Claire we were seeing or was it another one of her personalities?

I’ve gotta say that Patrick had me fooled the entire book. I went from thinking one thing about him to thinking another to rethinking my opinion. So, needless to say, I was surprised by what he revealed to Claire. I shouldn’t have been but I was. Actually, let me rephrase that. I was more shocked by what he revealed.

I was also surprised that the poem referenced in the book “Les Fleurs du Mal” is an actual book written by Charles Baudelaire. To be honest, I did think that it was made up. Until I did a google search and there was a ton of information about it. I’m not going go too much into him but I will say that those poems are freaky. Google them and him. You’ll see what I mean.

The end of the book was insane. It is where the plotline went from simple to complex. I am not going to get into much of the ending except I wasn’t expecting what happened to happen. Also, as I mentioned above, I wasn’t too sure about Claire. Even with everything revealed, I still had my doubts about her.

There were a few reasons why I didn’t give Believe Me a 5-star rating. The main reason was that the book got off to a slow start. I know that the author was laying the groundwork for Claire’s story but still. It crept. I almost DNF’d (but I am glad I didn’t).

I also felt that the plot faltered towards the middle of the book when Claire was in the mental hospital. I felt that her experiences in that hospital were not relevant to the storyline. It was interesting but not relevant.

My last reason was the last few chapters of the book and how Claire’s secret came out. While it was shocking, I definitely didn’t see it coming. It came out of left field. When the book finally ended, I felt it was anticlimactic.

What I liked about Believe Me:

A) Got under my skin

B) Complex characters

C) The end of the book

What I disliked about Believe Me:

A) Book got off to a slow start

B) Plot faltered towards the middle of the book

C) The ending felt almost anticlimactic

I would give Believe Me an Adult rating. There is sex. There is violence. There is language. I would suggest that no one under the age of 21 read this book.

There is a trigger warning for Believe Me. They are mental illness. If you are triggered by that, I suggest not to read the book.

I would reread Believe Me. I would recommend this book to family and friends. But I would include a warning about the triggers.

I would like to thank Random House Publishing Group, Ballantine Books, and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review Believe Me

All opinions stated in this review of Believe Me are mine

**I chose to leave this review after reading an advance reader copy**

This is a solid three star book.

Claire is an actress who makes money on the side luring cheating husbands into hitting on her, which she films and gives to a law firm. But when the latest wife is murdered, Claire is asked to go under cover and try to entrap the husband.

Why this book received three stars and not four is because the amount of plot changes. It was good, but a few were a little too far fetched for me. However, it’s still a solid read for those who like fast paced suspense/thriller books.

This review is provided by NetGalley. Believe Me will be available from Ballantine Books on July 24, 2018.
Author J.P. Delaney (no relation to me) provided some history of the book that became Believe Me. It was a different story about an actress going undercover for a sting operation for law enforcement. It was with a different publisher and now out of print. The core premise stuck with Delaney, so after success with what others consider his big break novel, The Girl Before, he went back to the roots of that old story and rewrote it from scratch.
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Believe Me is the first of Delaney’s books that I’ve read so I don’t have any other baseline for comparison. In a nutshell: it’s fast-paced, exhilarating, filled with twists, and some graphic details that might put off certain readers. (*Note: if you like the graphic content of shows like BONES or CRIMINAL MINDS, this is along those lines.)
Claire Wright is a British actor trying to make her way into the industry in America. She’s doing so illegally and having a difficult time obtaining the proper kind of acting jobs to secure a green card or visa. At the start, readers might like Claire. She’s a survivor and struggling to get by in New York City. To make any money at all, she works as a honeypot bait — a private investigator, Henry, hires her to see if husbands are cheating on their wives. In this capacity, readers get to see that Claire has to follow a strict set of rules. She can’t be the one to approach the men; she can’t make the offer for sex; she stops the job before there’s any physical contact. Then she gets paid and usually moves on to the next case. Understanding that Claire is capable of following rules is important as she begins to unravel throughout the story.
Stella Fogler hires Henry and Claire, but her job offer comes with dark and terrifying warnings:
“You will be careful, won’t you? Promise me you’ll be careful. He’s like no man you’ve ever met. I mean it. Don’t turn your back on him. Don’t trust him. Do you promise?”
Claire thinks Stella is being dramatic and too paranoid. She’s been taking care of herself since she was a kid from an abusive family and moved through foster care. Unlike escorts, Claire is determined to be the best actor possible. To do that, Claire uses The Method approach to acting. It’s where the actor goes beyond researching a role and actually lives as the character, never breaking.
Claire is approached by Detective Frank Durban and Dr. Kathryn Latham, a forensic psychologist. Latham has been tracking a serial killer who fits the profile of Patrick Fogler, Stella’s husband. He’s a handsome poetry scholar specializing in the work of Baudelaire. When Stella is gruesomely murdered in a pattern matching the details of one of Baudelaire’s poems, Claire takes the assignment lest she become a suspect herself as one of the last people to see Stella alive.
The story is outrageous in all the ways amateur detective stories are. Readers know the FBI or NYPD aren’t going to take some untrained civilian and put her in harm’s way like Claire is hired. That’s neither here nor there. You go with it on a bloody and twisted ride. There are sections where Claire replays events and readers don’t get prose paragraphs; the memories and sometimes completely irrational pondering by Claire are typed out like a screenplay. The book is also broken down clearly into three parts following the traditional three acts of a play or movie lending more to the presentation regarding Claire always being in character.
Claire becomes such an unreliable narrator that readers will be wondering how much of the threats against her are all in her head. She’s institutionalized at the end of part two. It seemed like it could have ended there: Claire is suffering from an extreme histrionic dissociative episode and she can’t escape her own mind. Part three reveals why she continued to stay in character the whole time. Latham’s profile of the serial killer states that Claire would have to appear so vulnerable that the prime suspect, Patrick, would be the only possible savior. Having inherited Stella’s money, Patrick has the financial resources to hire a private doctor and lawyers to save Claire.
“In other words, maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe I’m just the kind of woman who male doctors historically haven’t liked very much.” — Claire Wright
By chapter thirty-three, it’s clear that Claire has developed real feelings for Patrick. She admits to liking him and eventually she does fall in love with him. This may be the point where every feminist reader thinks the book is more sexual fantasy crap written by a man. Stay the course. Get to the end. It’s all about method acting and how difficult it is for the Real Claire to separate herself from the Character Claire.
When Claire needs to feel alive, she goes head first into danger with Patrick. They play constant destructive, abusive games with each other while at the same time professing it’s all about trust.
“Not because discovering Patrick’s a murderer would stop me loving him. But because, if he is a murderer, I don’t want him to keep it hidden from me.” — Claire Wright
Again, I say stick with it. Claire has plenty of flashbacks to acting class where her instructor discusses making emotions real and believable. The bottom line is Claire is the ultimate survivor. Readers may not agree with her methods and processes at all, but she manages to be as unkillable as an 1980’s action hero.
Besides the fiction of law enforcement hiring an unemployed actor to go undercover, there’s only one other note I made. A silly one: absinthe doesn’t contain hallucinogens. It is delicious and gets you extremely drunk. If you like the taste of licorice, I highly recommend having some served properly. It comes in green and white varieties and is not illegal.
I don’t know if the real Charles Baudelaire is as fucked up as the one presented by Delaney, who admits that he took plenty of artistic license in translating the French poetry. The character of Baudelaire has religious followers who share photographs of the murders they’ve committed through a portal on the Dark Web behind a site called Necropolis. The theme in using horrific translations of Baudelaire comes down to what responsibility artists bear in the real world if someone is inspired by their work to commit crimes.
“What responsibility do we have, as artists, for the effect our work has in the real world?” a theater director asks of Patrick Fogler regarding his play about Baudelaire.
Since I haven’t read Gone Girl or other psychological thrillers (I’m admittedly too scared most of the time), I can honestly say Believe Me has its share of mindfucks which I think is what authors of this genre intend.
Content Notes:
Graphic violence against women including women of color.
Suicide attempts and self-harm.
Psychiatric institutional scenes including heavy medication.
Rating: 4.5 stars (brilliantly executed, but is definitely not for everyone)

Thanks to NetGalley & the publisher for the advance copy of “Believe Me” by JP Delaney. I will not give any spoilers. It’s a good mystery/Thriller book. It was very well written and you won’t want to stop reading as you want to see and keep guessing what will happen next. I would love to read other books by this author in the future. I enjoyed this book & hope you will too.

“Believe Me” by JP Delaney is a mystery/thriller about a young acting student named Claire who is caught up in a police sting to catch a murderer.
The novel started out with great pacing and characters, but quickly devolved into an absolutely preposterous story with asinine twists and turns.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.




Thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for the advanced copy.

Intense, Riveting, Gripping, Fast moving book

Claire is a struggling actor who grew up in the foster care system and agrees to work with divorce attorneys to seduce straying husbands and catch their infidelity. The stakes get higher when there is a murder and Claire is asked to try to seduce the killer and get him to confess.

This book was dark and sexy and edge of your seat thrilling. There were times when I was wondering if Claire was acting or not and I could not predict the ending. A portion of the book is written like a script, so it was a fast read. I loved it and I highly recommend it.