Believe Me by J.P. Delaney #bookreview #thriller

Title: Believe Me

Author:  J.P. Delaney

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Publication Date: July 24, 2018

Page Count: 352

My rating: 4 stars

About the book:

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 struggling actor, a Brit in America without a green card, Claire needs work and money to survive. Then she gets both. But nothing like she expected.

Claire agrees to become a decoy for a firm of divorce lawyers. Hired to entrap straying husbands, she must catch them on tape with their seductive propositions.

The rules? Never hit on the mark directly. Make it clear you’re available, but he has to proposition you, not the other way around. The firm is after evidence, not coercion. The innocent have nothing to hide.

Then the game changes.

When the wife of one of Claire’s targets is violently murdered, the cops are sure the husband is to blame. Desperate to catch him before he kills again, they enlist Claire to lure him into a confession.

Claire can do this. She’s brilliant at assuming a voice and an identity. For a woman who’s mastered the art of manipulation, how difficult could it be to tempt a killer into a trap?

But who is the decoy . . . and who is the prey?

Believe Me by J.P. Delaney is a psychological thriller that brought out that side of me that argues with myself. My reaction while reading this one…. What?? Yes… well, no… yes… no way! Yeah, you get my point.

The book begins with Claire doing what she does to earn money, propositioning a man in a bar. But it’s not what one would think in any way, Claire works for a law firm going undercover to catch cheating spouses since acting jobs are hard to come by for someone without a green card.

Normally these jobs go very quickly for Claire, all she has to do is wait for the mark to approach her and flirt a bit all the while getting them on camera. But Claire is surprised when a mark doesn’t fall for her attempts but even more surprised when the wife is upset her husband didn’t cheat. What Claire never expected after the job was over was to find herself in the middle of a murder investigation.

This is one that I’m not sure if it would be for everyone as it is certainly different. They style the author chose was one that took a little getting used to. A lot of the conversations and such are in an interview type of format but since the story was intriguing I went along with the differences well enough. Once the twists in the book begin to happen my internal debate meter shot off the chart and it wasn’t as if you are thrown a whole pile of suspects but the psychological side showed in playing mind games with the reader. In the end I was glad I picked this one up as it certainly was an entertaining read.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

Find this book online: 

Goodreads  /   Amazon