I had enjoyed the Girl Before and eagerly awaited this novel. Sadly I was very disappointed. I found the main Character Claire, completely unlikeable and seriously messed up. I was trying to finish the book last night, all I could think was "omg, how much more of there is this?"

After a disastrous on set affair with her leading man, Claire is not exactly in high demand. She is in the country from England without a green card and no one to hire her as an actress.

When she is approached by a law firm who specialize in divorce to become a decoy, hired to find out if husbands are cheating or at least thinking about it. The job is fairly easy. Use your acting skills and tape everything but under no circumstances sleep with them or proposition them first. Just get the evidence and sneak out.

But when the wife of the target is violently killed in her hotel room, it seems the husband is a good candidate for murder. When they come to Claire with a plan to get him to confess and a part for her to play that earns actual money, Claire jumps in with both feet!

And this is where it all goes insane! Claire's mind is really a stage with her voicing all of the characters. Or are they real people? Who exactly is the bad guy here? Is she insane?

This was what I've come to expect from this author. The ultimate mental maze that leaves you exhausted and asking What???    Great Job.

Netgalley/ July 24th 2018 by Random House

Years ago, an author wrote a book called The Decoy…it was published but nothing really happened. Later, after that author published a best-seller (The Girl Before), they re-wrote The Decoy and thanks to Random House-Ballantine and NetGalley, I received a copy in exchange for my honest review.

So, we meet Claire, a young British woman living in the U.S. without a green card, which limits her employability. She is an actress, and when she gets the opportunity for a fairly well-paying job that involves role-playing, she takes it. In this job, she works for a private detective on a cash basis as as a decoy, basically working to entrap men who cheat on their wives/partners. She gets everything on tape when the man propositions her. She does this very well, until a wife who is being cheated on is murdered, the police suspect the husband, and they basically put the screws to Claire (under threat of deportation) to help them get a confession from the man.

It sounded interesting, especially as I am a fan of psychological thrillers, and I enjoyed The Girl Before. But as this story goes along, it isn’t clear whether Claire is playing her role for the police extremely well, or maybe she is the one the police suspect of the murder and robbery of the wife, and the police are working to entrap her??

Parts of the book are presented as if it is a script, and there is a lot of literary pretension with quotes from Baudelaire dealing with his book on S&M poetry (S&M being part of the whole scene), and parts of it are fine. Maybe it is just me, but after awhile I really didn’t care what happened to Claire, who committed the murder, what happened to them, or if Claire was deported. No one was really likeable, and I just wanted it to be over with. My classic example is the way I felt when I saw the movie Raising Phoenix: I REALLY didn’t like it, but I just HAD to finish it to see what happened. I finished this book and struggled to decide how many stars, ending up with two.

J.P. Delaney is the pseudonym of Tony Strong, who wrote The Death Pit, Tell Me No Lies, and The Decoy (which was re-written and published as Believe Me) in the late 90s and early 00s. Not my thing.

I did not like this author's first book, but this one blew me away. Claire gives her performance of a lifetime. I was hooked from the beginning and was surprised by every turn this thriller took. Could not put it down.

I guess the combination of BDSM, Baudelaire’s S&M poetry and gore just proved too much for me in Believe Me, and I’ve put it down at around 50% of the way through. I just can’t force myself to continue. If the plot were more coherent, and the characters more likable and believable, I might just have managed getting to the end. Alas, it is a DNF for me.

I will say that I thought the use of viewing scenes as though staging a play was quite interesting. As an actress, Claire sees things framed to her experience and also tries to figure out how to use it in her career, which seems a valid point of view to me and not a style I’ve seen before.

Thanks to NetGallery, the publisher and author for allowing me to receive an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

the book was very interesting. Plot was well developed. really enjoyed this book and the characters.

I don't believe in giving negative feedback for a book I received free, but this will be an exception. Not only does this have to be the weirdest story I've ever read but, also, one of the most disgusting! I'm afraid I cannot recommend it!

After reading a few uninspiring thrillers, this novel was exactly what I needed. It was great fun! Lots of plot twists, action, romance, and always guessing to the very end. This was a page turner and I loved getting to know the inner workings of our unreliable narrator. Highly recommend!

Staying true to her writing form in The Girl Before - Delaney delivers another rollercoaster of a psychological suspense novel.. Thanks for another great book!

Overall, this book was a very quick read with a lot of twists and turns throughout. However, I felt like it was just all over the place. There were so many twists and turns that it started to distract from the story. I had really high hopes during the first quarter or so of the book, but then the story started to derail. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

So I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I couldn't put it down because I was trying to figure out what was going to happen next in the story. On the other hand, I found it hard to keep up with the story line sometimes. Claire is a very complicated character with some deep issues. The way the story is written where it appears there are scenes as if it's from a script made it hard to figure out what was really happening & what might be in Claire's head. All in all I would recommend reading this novel if you're into suspenseful books that keep you guessing right up until the end!

Having read THE GIRL BEFORE by JP Delaney I was anxious to read BELIEVE ME. THE GIRL BEFORE ME was intriguing and just creepy enough to keep it interesting,

BELIEVE ME was a fun thriller where you will be trying to figure out where the acting ends and the real story begins.

An interesting story that immediately intrigues and involves the reader, an actress hired to act the part of a woman interested in married men, hired by their wives, attempting to catch them in the act, until one such job goes very wrong.

A real page turner, multi-faceted characters will keep you reading long past your bedtime; do not pass this one up.

What a book! You won't want to miss this one if you like psychological thrillers. A murder and two suspects. JP Delaey brings you on a ride you won't forget. Wow. It will keep you guessing the whole book. Did the husband Patrick kill his wife and for what reason? Did Claire an excellent up and coming actress who is in America legally but without a green card yet, kill his wife? Why would she when she'd only met her that night. Police detective, Frank, and the Forensic Psychologist, Dr. Latham are asking for her help in finding evidence on Patrick. Asking is just a polite way of making her help in exchange for a green card vs deportation. But did they push to hard and push Claire into a psychotic break. There are so many twists and turns you can never be sure what is what and who is good and who is bad. I can't wait to read more from this author. I thank the publisher and the author for allowing me to read this digital copy in exchange for my unbiased review.

Loved Claire - rooting for her the entire time. Great ending - so unexpected! Highly recommend to any reader who enjoys psychological thrillers. Just wish I knew who the author really is so I can be sure to read more of his/her work, though maybe I already have???

This was definitely a rollercoaster of a thriller. The book had a great premise, an actress that was hired to act the part of a woman interested in married men, typically hired by their wives, to see if they were being unfaithful. I love the way the format of the sorry, it almost reads like a screenplay.

This book was so well-written that I found myself immersed in it immediately. I could not put the book down and found myself staying up way too late to read it. An excellent thriller/mystery that I definitely recommend to lovers of the genre.

*I would like to thank the author/publisher/Netgalley for the opportunity to read it in exchange for a fair and honest review*

really enjoyed JP Delaney's previous book The Girl Before, so I was looking forward to this one. Claire is a struggling actress from the UK that is trying to make it in New York. Unfortunately, she isn't getting many acting gigs. She is offered a job to lure men into sex so that their wife can catch them. But when Claire meets her next lure, Patrick, she finds that he doesn't take the bait... which just doesn't happen to Claire. Then when Patrick's wife is found murdered, Claire immediately becomes a suspect, as does Patrick.

Let the games begin... who is telling the truth and who is acting? This book is laid out so differently since their are a lot "scenes" - it makes the reader wonder if they are actually happening or are they just in Claire's head. Claire and Patrick soon begin a romance through poetry that they both have a love for. I thought this book was suspenseful with a lot of twists, you never knew which way it was going to go.

I don’t know what to say. I loved The Girl Before and I enjoyed every chapter of this novel until the final twist and then… well, there’s no way of sugarcoating it… I hated it. The ending was unexpected but not in a good way, since it made the whole plot unbelievable and ludicrous. In the afterword, the author explains how this novel is based on a book that he published before without success and this is the rewrite of that original idea. It is actually quite brilliant: an actress goes undercover to entrap a serial killer. Claire is a Brit who lives in NY. She is a talented actress but has no Green Card, so she has to find creative ways of making ends meet. For instance, she puts her acting skills to good use seducing husbands on behalf of their wives to help them with divorce proceedings. When one of such wives is murdered, suspicions fall on the hubby. Claire doesn’t believe that he did it because he seemed too earnest and likable, despite his creepy fascination with Baudelaire. In exchange for a Green Card, she offers her services to the Police to go undercover and find out if he did it. I worked for years in the production side of the theatre business, and I was surprised at how relatable the characters were. All those actors living for their art and sometimes getting too caught up in their drama reminded me of real people I knew. And despite of being a manipulative, narcissistic witch, I sympathized with Claire. I really enjoyed 85% of the book and would have given it 5 stars if it had ended there, but then “the twist” came and, based on what came next, I would have given it zero stars. So I will average my rating and give it 3. I hope the author has gotten these resurrected ideas out of his system and moves on with the superior novels that we all know he can write.

Believe me by JP Delaney was one of the most messed up thrillers I have read in a while. The question throughout the book is mostly --who do you believe? Claire Wright is the main character and she is an actress, a really good one. The story follows her through her entrapments of married men who cheat and her subsequent involvement in a murder investigation. The book is intense and creepy. The fact that you don't know who to trust throughout the crazy events that happen keeps you in suspense for the majority of the book. However, the plot had a few holes so I could not give it a 5 star rating. I definitely recommend to anyone who likes twisted.

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review.

Thriller fans will probably enjoy this one, but I personally thought it it didn't hold up to The Girl Before. It does have a lot of popular elements, however: an unreliable narrator, multiple twists, etc.

Wow! This book was a head trip. Seriously messed up and yet I could NOT put it down. Warning: Believe Me has a lot of sexual deviance. In some ways it reminded me of Aleatha Romig’s Truth trilogy....which I have only read the first book. In this novel the reader is constantly trying to figure out what’s real as everyone seems to be acting. There is a murder. Who did it gets a bit lost along the twisted path Claire and Patrick hurl down. About 10% away from the books ending that thread gets picked up again, and I laughed out loud to realize I had gotten so tangled up in the sick “romance” between Claire and Patrick that I had forgotten there was a murder to be solved! It is rare for me to not be distracted by stories wandering off course of the main mystery. In Believe Me, I was neither distracted or annoyed about it, just pulled right along as the author surely was aiming to do.

Because of the themes, this will not be a book for everyone. But for those that can handle reading it, I would highly recommend it for its uniqueness and sleight of hand. It will be a book I remember for a long while. Well played, JP Delaney!

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for providing me with an advanced ecopy in exchange for an honest review.