Krysten’s Review

“Sometimes, when you wear a mask too long, you find it sticks to the skin.”

Believe Me by J.P. Delaney is a twisty thriller that will keep you guessing until the end—not unlike the narrator Claire, a British actress who came to America to escape a sordid affair with a married co-star. Unable to get a job to pay for her acting classes without a green card, she does under-the-table work for a law firm that catches cheating spouses. When one of the clients is brutally murdered, she agrees to work for the police to catch the suspected killer.

Claire dives headfirst into her role, working with a forensic psychologist and NYPD detective to construct her character: Someone curious about BDSM and fascinated by the morbid poetry of Charles Baudelaire. Soon she approaches Patrick—the mysterious widower suspected of murdering not only his wife but several other women, mimicking key passages from Baudelaire’s poetry—and they forge a relationship built on an interesting dichotomy of trust and lies. It isn’t long until she realizes she has fallen in love with him…and that the only way they can be together is if he is innocent and she comes clean.

But when she is double crossed and committed to a pysch ward, the line between fantasy and reality is blurred. Claire, like the reader, spends much of the book wondering how she can tell the difference between reality and fantasy—and, more importantly, whom she can trust. Her paranoia takes over, and the people around her—people she thought she knew, people she thought she could trust—turn into suspects. Just when she thinks the nightmare is over—the real killer is caught, and she can truly trust Patrick after all—Delaney throws in another twist.

I enjoyed the parallels between what Claire was learning in her acting class and what was going on in reality that were woven throughout the book, and the use of an unreliable reliable narrator was intriguing. The twists sprinkled throughout the book kept me on my toes. Typically, I don’t care for present-tense writing, but Delaney is a skilled writer, so I barely even noticed after the first couple of chapters. I’d be interesting in reading the original book Delaney mentions in the acknowledgments to see how the story evolved. All in all, an enjoyable read!