I enjoyed reading "The Girl Before" by this author and was exited to read another book by this author. "Believe Me" did not disappoint. From the very beginning I tried and failed to guess how the story was going to end but there were so many twist and turns to this thriller I couldn't guess. The story line is quite engaging and well written and just when you think you know what is happening, you proven wrong. This is a book you will devour to the very end just because you will want to know just how this author will play out the climax! A great read.

Having read The Girl Before last year I was really looking forward to Believe Me and I was not let down. Suspense thrillers are obviously meant to keep you guessing but 90% of the time you read the clues and see the foreshadowing so you can usually figure out what's going on midway through the book but the ride is still fun getting to the ending. With this one I don't think I had any clue whatsoever how this was going to end.

Claire is very good at what she does and sometimes it seems just too good. As the husband of the victim, Patrick is naturally the prime suspect but then you see his softer side and you can't help but fall in love with him right along with Claire. Then the twists and turns start coming at you from all sides and you have no choice but to keep reading to learn what the heck is really going on.

For me this was a very quick read. I just had to know! I will say that although the ending was a shocker that fit with the story but I was a bit disappointed by it. After the ride we I went through to get there I expected a bigger splash.

If you love psychological suspense thrillers then this is a must for you. Hopefully like me, you won't be able to guess the ending so you'll be sucked in to the very end.

Spellbinding from beginning to end! I can't say much about the story without giving something away, so let me just say that it is well written - it's amazing what the author has done - and you will be kept 'on the edge of your seat' until the final chapter. Enjoy!!

Thanks to NetGalley for an ARC of this book. I kept seeing it on lists and am excited I received in in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I’ll try to do this with no spoilers....

First, I’m giving it a solid 3 Stars. There were bits I loved and bits I did not love.

Synopsis: Claire Wright is a British foster child turned struggling actress in the good ole NYC, trying to outstay her visa and go to acting school, but she can’t work without a green card, so she’s left working for a law firm that catches philandering husbands for rich wives. Claire is an excellent actress and is very good at what she does. When one of the wives that have hired Claire turns up dead, a sudden turn in events lands Claire with a detective and forensic psychologist that want her to continue her work on the husband, but for them now.

What I liked: The beginning. I loved how the story took off with how Claire convinces herself she’s these characters. And then when it turned to the opposite side, I still liked it at the beginning. I also liked the random bits that read like a screenplay. I thought that was a good touch, since Claire sees her life as a movie she’s playing a part in.


What I didn’t like: The end of part 2 and most of part 3. It got a little (perhaps a lot) muddled and I was just trying to finish to stay on top of it all and find out what happened. The characters were almost over the top at times and I couldn’t get a good grasp on the main character, which left me feeling unsettled.

What I loved: THE ENDING!!! I really thoroughly enjoyed it. It just really slowed down beforehand, but the slowing caught me way off guard.

It was like an excellent episode of Law & Order. I would recommend this book to a friend, with a disclaimer that the middle slows, but keep plowing through. Bravo!

A fun sexy thriller where you will be constantly wondering where the acting ends and the real people begin!

Having enjoyed reading THE GIRL BEFORE, I was looking forward to reading BELIEVE ME.
I read it in one day. The plot and main character drew me in and the twists kept me reading.
In THE GIRL BEFORE, I enjoyed the technique of alternating chapters between the two women. In BELIEVE ME, I think the technique of presenting some scenes as stagecraft might put some readers off. I found it to be a fresh and interesting approach, adding depth to the story.
Most importantly, the twists kept coming and I had to find out what happened next.
I’m now a fan of JP Delaney.

In Believe Me, the story focuses on Claire’s character who is an actress studying in America from the UK. She’s offered a role as an undercover agent trying to get Patrick to admit he killed Stella.
Claire is a struggling actor in need of money. Claire takes acting courses mastering her skills. Her job is to make others believe her act.

The story started off interesting and I’m curious about the outcome, but something is lacking. I was following along with the slow pace storyline until the mention of this book Les Fleurs du Mal. The references from this book were confusing. Then the author included translations of Baudelaire’s poems which were boring.

This story took an unconventional approach at solving a crime by hiring an actress to play many roles to earn the trust of one man who was thought to be the killer. Instead, I feel duped by the police investigation for the crime of Patrick’s wife. This method got carried away with explanations about this book and the poems that I began to lose interest.
A psychological thriller shouldn’t be this confusing. I usually enjoy trying to solve the crime and studying the motives of characters, but this is layer after layer of mistrust. I struggled with its delivery. I had very little interest in Claire and Patrick’s character. Nothing worked for me.

I was so drawn to the cover of this book. The cover and book description were so promising. Once Patrick’s character was introduced with his preachings about Baudelaire I started skimming.

I enjoyed Believe Me, yet at the same time it was more graphic than I expected. Another thriller by Delaney that is hard to put down!

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for a digital galley of this novel.

Definitely a 4.5 read for me despite the graphic descriptions of the murder scenes left by a sexual serial killer. In all honesty, if you take away those brutal words you lose the entire purpose of the book but just be warned, if you feel you will be uncomfortable reading those descriptions you should give this book a miss.

This book, Believe Me, is a re-work of the novel The Decoy (published in 2001 by Tony Strong) while keeping the basic plot but making substantial changes. Believe Me is a psychological thriller that kept me off balance the entire way through. The main character is an actress and her ability to take on any role she chooses made me wonder exactly who Claire really was at any moment. When was she acting? What was Claire and what was her character? These were the same traits which made Claire so valuable to the police in their undercover operation. J. P. Delaney included a lot of acting lessons and techniques to show readers what a really good actress Claire was, he certainly convinced me. Another device to fill out the premise of an actor's life was in using dialog boxes; it is as if you are reading the script of a play. You will either like this technique or it will become bothersome but it is not used exclusively throughout the book. Because I believed the premise of Claire's abilities I lost my objectivity to tell whether she was acting a role or not. It was interesting but also somewhat disconcerting. I can certainly understand why readers might not finish reading the book. Luckily for me I pressed on and found myself surprised by multiple twists in the plot until I finally stopped trying to figure out how it was going to end. Then the ending turned out to be the least interesting part. Go figure.

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!