Believe Me: A Novel

by JP Delaney

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] rich, nuanced, highly literary take on the Gone Girl theme.”—Booklist (starred review)
 
Claire Wright is desperate. A British drama student in New York without a green card, she takes the only job she can get: working for a firm of divorce lawyers, posing as an easy pickup in hotel bars to entrap straying husbands. But then the game changes. 
 
When one of her targets becomes the suspect in a murder investigation, the police ask Claire to use her acting chops to lure him into a confession. From the start, she questions the part she’s being asked to play: Is Patrick Fogler a killer? Or is there more to this setup than she’s being told?
 
Claire will soon realize she is playing the deadliest role of her life. 
 
Praise for Believe Me
 
“For readers who enjoyed the paranoia factor in A. J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window or the unreliable narrator of Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train.”—Library Journal
 
“Produces a bobsled run’s worth of twists.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“An intense, stylish psychological thriller.”—Good Housekeeping
 
“A dark and haunting thriller . . . A superb evocation of conflicted emotions, this never lets you guess what’s coming next.”—Daily Mail
 
“I so enjoyed it—what a twisty, exciting read.”—Sabine Durrant, author of Lie With Me

• ISBN10: 0525633162
• ISBN13: 9780525633167
• Publish Date: 24 July 2018
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Diversified Publishing
• Imprint: Random House Large Print
• Edition: Large type / large print edition
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 496
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780525633167

Reviews

[whisperingchapters]

Always amazed by Delaney's craft, writing, her brain that creates these twisted and enthralling stories that I can't get enough of. This was another win for me and a great start to 2019! I'm just blown away but every single detail of this book, especially once I reached the ending. It definitely fooled me to the very end. This is going on my fave reads of the year already!

[Leah]

Last year’s breakout author was, undoubtedly, JP Delaney, an anonymous pseudonym, with hit bestseller, The Girl Before. I personally couldn’t get into it, although I may go back and revisit it now that I’ve read Believe Me. However, I’m a firm believer in giving authors a second chance (and even third or fourth chances – sometimes, I never learn) and I really liked the premise of Believe Me, even more so when I realised a lot of it was script scenes, pretty much meaning this would be a fairly quick read regardless of whether I liked it or not. I’m pleased to say, this was actually a brilliant read.

I think what I liked about Believe Me is that I actually never knew where the plot was going – Claire is a very, very good actress and I couldn’t tell what was faked and what was real and so for a lot of the novel I wasn’t sure in the slightest of what was going on; even more so when the whole Patrick situation begins. Claire isn’t necessarily unreliable – if anything, I wanted to believe everything she was saying and I really liked her narration, but I just felt unsettled the entire time I was reading. I wasn’t sure, in the slightest, who had killed Patrick’s wife. Was it Claire? Patrick? A third party? It was so hard to pick either one because both had their times where I thought it was them and both had their times where I was sure they were both innocent.

I do wonder how believable the novel is as a whole – I mean, when you get to the end it’s a bit like WTF just happened, is that real kinda thing? But I cannot deny it was entertaining, I was thoroughly into this book throughout, the whole thing was crackers but a really entertaining crackers. It’s actually a re-write of an older novel of Delaney’s (published as Tony Strong) but you can see that the plot is so clever and unique. I gobbled it up.

I really loved Believe Me. The premise was unique and intriguing and the narrative and structure of the novel kept me hooked throughout. I really liked Claire, even if I didn’t trust her 100% and the ending was just spectacular. I thoroughly recommend this book and I can’t wait to go back and give The Girl Before another go because if it’s even slightly like Believe Me, it’s going to be amazing.

[kristy]

I received this ebook from the publisher for a review through Netgalley. This book was different then what I was expecting and different from a lot of the other suspense novels that I have been reading recently. I was able to predict who I thought was the murderer, but I enjoyed all of the different twists and turns that you had to get through to get there. I enjoyed the short chapters and it made it seem like I was flying through the book. I'm not really in to poetry and one of the major emphasis of the book revolving around poetry did get old to me after a while, but it stuck out because it was different then what I have been seeing in other novels. I have read this authors other novel, The Girl Before, and I would recommend both to other suspense readers