Thank you to netgalley for the copy of this book.

I really enjoyed Believe Me. It was a unique addition to the thriller genre and kept me guessing with twists and turns. The characters were interesting and the plot was well thought out. I rated it 4 stars as I didn’t love the ending and was a bit confused about one little part at the end but that did not detract from my overall enjoyment of the book. Highly recommend.

I was excited for this book, as I really enjoyed The Girl Before. Unfortunately, this was a letdown. I almost feel like it was written by a completely different person.

The gimmick of the play-writing style was interesting but didn’t quite work in this case. It was choppy, disjointed, and distracting. The scenes were short without any detail, but also dragged on because of the lack of action. I found myself wanting to stop reading almost every time I picked up the book.

The twists and turns didn’t make much sense. While I’m all for a book with tons of twists, this just seemed forced. The final twist was pretty cool, though a bit unbelievable if I’m honest.

I think a lot of the play details in the last third could have been cut out, as they didn’t seem to add anything to the story.

Several times I found myself wondering if it was supposed to be a romance, which bored me out of my skull.

I appreciate the author wanting to keep readers on their toes, not knowing who to trust or what to believe. It was a unique premise, like The Girl Before. I hope in the future he can maintain the same sense of intrigue, but with better developed narrative.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

Believe Me is about a woman desperate to be an actress that becomes a civilian working undercover as part of a police operation. While the plot was good, I found the storyline to. e confusing and at times hard to follow. I did very much enjoy the ending and was surprised by the twists.

It has been a few years since upon finishing a book I have been left wondering what the hell just happened. <b><I>Believe Me</I></b> by JP Delaney has made me do just that. It is a mind-bending, WTF type of a moment that has left me both thrilled and shaken to the core.

<blockquote><i>In describing a poem by Baudelaire about a menagerie of evils, a riddle is posed as thus: Who is the monster even worse than these? The answer is <b><u>YOU</u></b>, the reader, who can enjoy the horrors in his poems without having to bloody your own hands.</I></blockquote>

This book was an interesting and captivating exploration of what is real. It is a twisty and compelling read, and a prime example of the unreliable narrator. Throughout the book the reader is left trying to decifer their own trust of the characters, and what is truth. Without the solid rock to tether to, the reader is taken on a wild journey. In my case, I found me feelings for Claire to flip-flop more than a politician. The trust readers give to the authors is quite amazing, and it is a fantastic experience when the author can abuse that trust, suspend "normal" rules, and deliver us an experience that leaves us in awe. That to me is the essence of what happens in this book. I look forward to rereading it over time to try and get a similar experience, although it is never the same as the first time.

There is a definite genius to the writing of this novel. I enjoyed the characters, even though I was conflicted on several of them throughout the book. I am without words right now, in a very good way. I definitely would recommend this book to anyone who wants to embark on the journey and be thrown around like a roller coaster and be left wondering "what the hell just happened?".

My deepest gratitude to NetGalley and the team at PenguinRandomHouse for presenting me the opportunity to advance read this in exchange for my opinions.

This book had so many twists and turns that at times it was hard to keep up. I had a very hard time understanding the main character which I think was the point of the book. I really enjoyed how short the chapters were and I was not expecting the ending. Overall I think it is a book worth reading, especially if you like thrillers. I do wish they tied a few more things up but other than that it was well written,

views > Believe Me
Believe Me by J.P. Delaney
Believe Me
by J.P. Delaney (Goodreads Author),
Tony Strong (Pseudonym)

M 50x66
Lou Jacobs's review
Jun 14, 2018 · edit

really liked it

Query: Is this a story of a serial killer OR the development of a twisted personality in an orphan young girl who was raised in multiple foster homes? The two main protagonists are Professor Patrick Folger and Brit actress Claire Wright. And center stage is the infamous collection of Baudelaire's poems: "Les Fleur du Mal" - The Flowers of Evil ... dealing with decadence, eroticism and sadism and translated by Patrick.
Struggling actress Claire finds herself without a green card and desperate to pay her expenses and rent in expensive New York City. A job presents itself working for a law firm in which she can use her natural skills. On behalf of the suspicious wife , she engages the husband in a social setting to test his fidelity ... being flirtatious but not actually propositioning and filming the encounter. Unfortunately, most of the suspected husbands proposition her. In an extremely unusual job she is asked to meet the wife in a hotel room before the "sting" ... she appears agitated and fearful.
Claire skillfully encounters Patrick at a bar ... and much to her chagrin he does not seem interested. But, the next day Patrick's wife is found brutally murdered in the same hotel room.
Who killed her ... Patrick or Claire. The police investigate ... and what ensues is a twisty psychological thriller with nebulous and equivocal motivations with escalating tension. Nothing seems to be what is apparent .... the reader races to an unexpected denouement that is artfully plotted.
Thanks to Netgalley and Ballantine books for providing an Uncorrected Proof of this enjoyable book in exchange for an honest review.

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.

I really enjoyed J.P. Delaney's The Girl Before and was pretty excited to get a sneak peek at Believe Me.  Delaney's newest offering didn't disappoint.

Believe Me has a unique structure--short, punchy chapters (which I love) with stage/screenplay type interludes as Claire imagines herself on screen or stage in various situations.  Looking through other reviews, people are mixed on the use of the screenplay bits but I really liked them.  It was different and refreshing.  I also enjoyed the connections made to Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire.  There was a distubringly sexy under

I love a good unreliable narrator, especially one that's not an alcoholic.  Ya'll know I'm funny about using alcohol/drugs to make a character untrustworthy with telling their  own story.  Claire is perfect--is she sane? Is she crazy? Is she really in love with a possible killer?  Or is she faking it.

Believe Me kept me guessing right up until the end--and I didn't get the ending that I was expecting, which is definitely a good thing.  Be sure to take this one with you to the beach this summer!

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.