Thank you to NetGalley for this E-ARC.

This was an interesting book. I’m assuming that’s its written in a way so that you can guess what’s supposed to happen. I enjoyed it but it was kind of the same as dark matter.

It was an interesting book. Kind of predictable but still interesting.

Thank you Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor -- Knopf for allowing me to read and review The Divide by Morgan Richter on NetGalley.

Published: 08/20/24

Stars: 3

Strong start. I loved the wit and snarky attitude of the main character. I laughed the first third of the book. I loved everything about her. All of a sudden I'm in the early days of Ground Hog Day (A movie where a day starts over repeatedly.) Every time two people meet the conversation is the same. There is a missing person, there is a doppelganger, there is a "psychic," there was a movie, each person is questioned. Then the main character rethinks the conversation. I wanted to cry. The quirkiness wore off. The last third of the book felt as if time stood still.

There were a couple missing pieces, I was waiting for a solution or explanation and couldn't tell you the answers. A part of me thinks that boredom settled in and perhaps I missed the answers. If there is a sequel, I'm going to pass on it.

In addition, Richter didn't hold back on the profanity.

Once upon a time, Jenny St John was an aspiring actress with one excellent leading role credit to her name. That movie, unfortunately, was never released, though its director Serge Grumet would go on to find lasting fame in the film industry. Jenny, on the other hand, bounced from audition to audition before finally giving up and taking on a different acting role entirely: dispensing advice to clients as a (fake) psychic while hiding her struggle to make ends meet.

When a police officer drops in on her clinic one day, her entire world is turned upside down. Not because she’s busted as a fraud – she’s way too good at reading people for that – but because Detective Moreau comes bearing bad news. Serge is dead, having been murdered in his Malibu home, and his ex-wife Gena Santos has gone missing. More pertinently to Jenny’s life, Gena was the spitting image of her, even going so far as to claim that Jenny’s role in The Divide was actually hers and that that had been how she and Serge met in the first place.

Jenny quickly proves to the detective that she and Gena are two entirely different people, even as she quietly seethes over this usurpation of the one big accomplishment of her life. Unable to help herself, she begins to poke into what happened to Serge and Gena, aided by Gena’s glamorous best friend, the Oscar-winning actress Boots Pontifex, who unreservedly believes in Jenny’s abilities. As well she should, for Jenny isn’t just your average con artist:

QUOTE
My favorite part of being a psychic–okay, yes, a fraudulent psychic–was getting the chance to solve puzzles. I loved digging beneath the surface of a client’s request and unearthing answers to the questions they hadn’t quite dared to put into words. I loved talking to people, thinking about them, figuring out what made them tick. I loved analyzing situations and behaviors, searching for anomalies and discovering logical explanations. I loved all of that, and I was good at it. Given enough time and freedom to snoop around and ask questions, I figured I could find Serge’s killer, and I could find Gena.
END QUOTE

The more Jenny digs, though, the more disturbing parallels she finds between herself and the missing woman. Neither of them has ever been eager to talk about the past, but both had embraced creative pursuits, with Jenny’s unsuccessful foray into acting contrasting with Gena’s accomplishments as an artist. As Jenny enters Gena’s rarefied world, she’s further disoriented by her effect on Gena’s inner circle. Almost everyone who knew Gena is taken aback by Jenny’s resemblance to her, and had accepted without question that Gena had starred in The Divide. Now Jenny is shaking up their long-standing beliefs, inadvertently provoking a killer to strike again in the process

Even as she faces a deadly physical threat, Jenny must deal with the existential crisis that Gena has engendered in her psyche. For so long, the one bright spot in her life as she teetered just above the poverty line was the pride she could take in her biggest accomplishment to date. Now some strange woman has stolen that, in addition to living the life of creative success that Jenny has always wanted.

It’s so unusual to find a murder mystery novel that grapples so thoughtfully with these questions of fate, identity and the paths not taken. Jenny is a very sympathetic narrator, smart but unlucky, regretful but also perhaps a little too hard on herself, especially in comparison to how forgiving she is of others:

QUOTE
It had made me feel shabby to realize I’d been one of many, that this was Serge’s well-documented modus operandi, that he apparently boinked his leading ladies and forgot about them as soon as the production had wrapped. All that aside, though, Serge had twice married age-appropriate women who had achieved substantial success in a field outside the entertainment industry. Maybe that mitigated his louche behavior, at least somewhat.

It’d be nice to think so. Because as much as I’d liked Serge at the time, as much as I still felt warmly toward him, as fantastic and life shaping an experience as filming The Divide had been, every once in a while I found it hard to shake off the nagging suspicion that maybe Serge was a bit of a sleazeball.
END QUOTE

Jenny’s investigation into Serge’s murder and Gena’s disappearance forces her to reevaluate many things she thought she knew, about both herself and others. It makes for a gripping tale of LA noir, even if I didn’t already have a soft spot for wisecracking fake-psychic detectives. It’s also a surprisingly wistful examination of the way that certain decisions can cause our life paths to diverge. I don’t know if I necessarily loved the way that the speculative fiction twist was posited in the narrative – I didn’t find it of a tone with the rest of the novel – but I did very much like the idea. I hope we’ll get a chance to read more of Jenny’s adventures in future, despite the fact that this book doesn’t really set up for a sequel. I just found her so endearing that I really want her to succeed.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the eARC.

This was a fun mystery! I loved the setting and the character journeys. I found myself trying and failing to predict the ending.

Loved this mystery by Morgan richter! Jenny is a once-aspiring actress who had a big break in a movie 20 years ago called the divide, but is now working as psychic. When she does a reading for a cop, she discovers that her old director has been murdered and the police are looking for his former wife-gena, a woman who looks identical to Jenny and is claiming to have panted her role in the divide. Bored with her life, Jenny decides to try to find what happened to serge and find out why gena has been using Jenny’s identify. Her quest will take her into hollywoods art world and she will have to grapple with her own past and identity in the process.
This is a beautiful blend of psychological thriller and LA noir with a touch of quirkiness added. Jenny is an interesting protagonist who will draw readers in as she tries to figure out exactly how and why she is involved. The novel moves through many twists and layers as it comes to its big denouement.
This book got me out of a reading slump and richter is a new voice in crime fiction I will be glad to read!

Thanks to the publisher for providing the arc via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This one was a mixed bag for me. The beginning really pulled me in, but my interest faded as the book went on. A book about mixed up look-alikes and the dark side of Hollywood sounded like it would be right up my alley. I definitely enjoyed some parts of the book, but it fell a bit flat for me. I ended up skimming a lot of it and then feeling kind of confused/let down by the ending. Which was probably my problem, not the book's.

I read an ARC of this book from NetGalley. All comments are my own.

I love all the things The Divide brings to the table mystery, Hollywood, and some psychic powers. Our main character Jenny along with a host of back up characters are very likable. I did think there were some areas where the book didn't quite move at the speed I would have liked. Overall, I would give it a 3 1/2 stars.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this eARC.

Morgan Richter’s “The Divide” is a captivating and darkly humorous mystery that plunges readers into the glitzy yet treacherous world of Hollywood.

The story follows Jenny St. John, a failed actress turned grifting psychic, who is thrust into a web of murder and corruption when she searches for her missing doppelgänger.

Richter masterfully explores themes of deception, ambition, and the duality of human nature.

Jenny St. John is a fascinating protagonist, whose sharp wit and resilience make her an engaging guide through the murky waters of Hollywood. Her transformation from a struggling actress to a cunning investigator is both believable and compelling.

Each character is meticulously crafted, with their own secrets and motivations that keep readers guessing.

Richter’s writing is sharp and evocative, capturing the glitz and grime of Hollywood with equal finesse. Her prose is both lyrical and gritty, creating a vivid and immersive reading experience.

The pacing is expertly managed, with each chapter revealing new layers of intrigue and suspense, as well as humor.

“The Divide” is a standout novel that showcases Morgan Richter’s talent for blending mystery, satire, and social commentary. It is a thrilling and thought-provoking exploration of the dark side of fame and the human psyche.

Whether you’re a mystery aficionado or simply looking for a gripping and entertaining read, “The Divide” is a novel that delivers on all fronts. It’s a brilliant addition to the genre and a testament to Richter’s skill as a storyteller.

Wow I really enjoyed this book! I didn’t think I would but I absolutely devoured it. I highly recommend picking this and you won’t want to stop!

The Divide is a gripping 'sci-fi' thriller that kept me on the edge of my seat from start to finish. I loved the fast-paced plot and the twists that came out of nowhere, making it impossible to predict what would happen next. The world-building is impressive, immersing you in a well-crafted universe that's both intriguing and believable.
However, some characters felt a bit underdeveloped, leaving me wanting to know more about their backstories and motivations. Despite this, the intense action and engaging writing style made it a captivating read that I couldn’t put down.

I enjoyed about 3/4ths of this book but the ending was confusing. Is there going to be a sequel or is this like Emma Clines The Guest but not as good? On the plus side I loved the character as grifter with a high IQ and the idea of these Hollywood types benign so daft they don’t realize or seem to care that their bff is a liar.

3.5, rounding down to 3. The first third of this book was really good and I was hooked. I wanted to understand why Gena had claimed Jenny’s work. Unfortunately, I never really got answers. The problem this book had was it laid out more questions than it could possibly answer. The conclusion just solves the murder, but doesn’t explain the various other mysteries going on throughout the book, so I just felt really dissatisfied in the end.

This was a weird book. We follow Jenny St. John, a forty-something washed-up actress in LA who's making a living (barely) as a psychic. Until one day a detective shows up asking questions and Jenny finds out she has a doppleganger, Gena, who's gone missing after the murder of her husband. Said husband was the director of Jenny's one and only movie role, and Gena was taking credit for it. Jenny becomes immersed in Gena's world, and the more she learns the more questions she has. 

I enjoyed the writing here and liked Jenny as a character, so I was having fun until about 85% in. I love some good complicated friendship dynamics. But the resolution of the whodunnit was lackluster for me and I still had so many questions about the connection between Gena and Jenny after that I was frustrated when I finished. I don't mind some loose threads if it fits with the tone of the rest of the book, but until the ending this felt very grounded in reality, so I wish things had been explained more expiclity. Thank you to the publisher and the author for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

Jenny St. John’s life is turned upside down when she gets a visit from a detective regarding an ex-boyfriend’s murder. His current wife, Gena, happens to be her doppelgänger.

This book had some interesting story lines but I just couldn’t seem to get all that invested. I wanted to like Jenny but for some reason I just didn’t. Her story felt very forced to me. I also didn’t fully understand the ending and her connection with Gena.

This books was sooooo stupid.

The characters were full. The plot felt like the author was trying so hard to make things happen. Nothing happened until the end.

I think of Morgan Richter as 'my Duran Duran pal Morgan.' I met her on Twitter about 10 years ago, while I was lurking on the edges of the Duran Duran fandom. She wrote a series of essays called 'Duranalysis' in which she does a deep-dive into Duran Duran's music videos. They're the perfect combination of affection, irreverence, and insight. Morgan is the person you wished sat next to you in the back of class, trying to make you laugh with her running commentary — and then when the teacher called on her to make her look stupid, she had the right answer ready to go.

So, Morgan was my Duran Duran pal — and then I found out she's written a handful of novels and she has deep experience in the entertainment world, including Talk Soup, one of the greatest TV shows of all time.

So let's talk about her new book 'The Divide.' This is a sun-drenched, neo-noir mystery set in modern Los Angeles.

When the story opens, we meet Jenny. She's a wannabe actress whose one big shot at fame decades ago fizzled out. Now she uses her empathy and intuition to work as a psychic-slash-life-coach. She works out of a vaguely crappy space she refers to as her clinic doing tarot readings and palmistry. Jenny is the narrator, and her voice has a nice gender-swapped, hard-boiled detective vibe. I liked her immediately because she's well-intentioned but also a bit beaten down. Example: She says her workspace 'smelled like failed hopes.'

What Jenny lacks in real psychic abilities, she makes up for with stellar people-reading skills. One day, a woman shows up without an appointment. She tries to sell Jenny some BS about reaching out to her mother in the spirit realm, but Jenny clocks her as a cop. When the cop questions her psychic abilities, Jenny says this:

'...You consider yourself a star in your field. You're arrogant about your abilities and your accomplishments, but you have reason to be. Your coworkers don't like you much, but you don't lose sleep over that, because you don't like them either... you're smarter than them. You dress better than them... The spirit realm doesn't exist for you. Under usual circumstances, you'd never bother with someone like me, but today you're here in your professional capacity with the LAPD... Will that do?'

Her reading is dead-on, but she could never have anticipated the rest. The cop is there on a murder investigation. The director of Jenny's first and only film has been killed. His ex-wife is the prime suspect, and she's gone missing. Weirdly, the ex-wife looks remarkably like our heroine Jenny. And the cops think the two women are one and the same. So Jenny does the only reasonable thing — she sets off on a quirky, dangerous adventure to solve the murder and clear her name.

I'm not the only one who enjoyed this book. The Wall Street Journal said it 'starts as an offbeat mystery and turns into an emotional tour de force.'

This story has all you could want from a mystery thriller: an amateur sleuth you root for, an inside peek at the art world, a prestige actress-turned-wellness guru, and surprising twists that get a little weird. Plus, it's very, very LA in the best way. A perfect book to end your summer reading.

I recommended this book in an episode of my podcast The Library of Lost Time on August 23, 2024 - https://strongsenseofplace.com/lolts/lolt-2024-08-23/

I couldn’t get past tge first few chapters of this novel. It all seemed too absurd. I found the characters impossible to relate to.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC.

A bit actress-turned-fake psychic becomes the prime suspect when the director of that long-ago forgotten movie turns up dead and his wife is missing. A wife who looks suspiciously similar to Jenny.

What could have been the book equivalent to a weekend TV movie, a popcorn read that's entertaining while it lasts, took a major nosedive once the plot hinged on a surprise twin. The ending also seemed to come out of left field: was there a ghost? was it all a parallel universe?

Morgan Richter’s The Divide is a neo-noir novel with the vibe of a David Lynch movie. The main character, Jenny St. John, came to Hollywood to be an actress and landed a role in Serge Grumet’s first film The Divide. By all accounts, Jenny did a good job playing a schizophrenic who slid through five parallel universes. However, the film never opened, and Jenny was not able to get an acting job thereafter.

Now, Jennie is on the skids, working as a fake psychic (her words), sleeping on a mattress on the floor of her office. Enter Detective Moreau of the LASD, investigating the murder of Serge Grumet and the disappearance of Serge’s ex-wife, the painter Genevieve (“Gena”) Santos. Gena is not only a dead ringer for Jenny St. John, but she has also claimed that she starred in The Divide instead of Jenny.

Jenny is hired by one of Gena’s friends to use her “psychic powers” to investigate what happened to Serge and Gena. Jenny also wants to find Gena to find out why she lied about starring in The Divide.

What follows is an excellent mystery as Jenny communicates with not only other people connected to The Divide, but also any current colleagues of Serge and Gena. This portion of the mystery is well-constructed as we learn clues along with Jenny. My only critique has to do with the mystery of Jenny and Gena which is never really resolved, and which may even have a paranormal component which was a bit of an eye roll for me. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the book overall.

Thanks to Knopf and to NetGalley for providing me with a complimentary advanced copy of this book.

In Hollywood everyone lives a lie to some degree

Jenny St John is not living the Hollywood life everyone dreams about. Twenty five years earlier she had arrived from Iowa with dreams of film stardom, and she almost made it. She got the starring role in an independent film called The Divide, the first film of director Serge Grumet, and gave an amazing performance only to have the film be shelved prior to release. While Serge went on to direct more films and garner great acclaim (and financial success) for his work, Jenny would never get another substantive part. She drifted into working along the fringes of moviemaking and for the past six years has been operating as an “intuitive counselor”, a sort of life coach using tarot cards and her inherent abilities to discern what people want to tell them what they want to hear. In short, she’s a fake psychic. When COVID hit, her already precarious career took a major hit and she was evicted from her apartment. Ever since, she’s lived (against the terms of her lease) in the shabby “clinic” she rents in a desirable location and is just getting by. Then she receives a visit from Toni Moreau, who claims to be a walk-in client but is in fact a detective with the LA Sheriff’s Department. Moreau is investigating the recent murder of Serge Grumet and the disappearance of his ex-wife Gena Santos, a successful painter in her own right. The kicker? Gena is a dead ringer for Jenny, so close in looks they could be twins. Moreau suspects that Jenny is actually Gena, trying to stay off the radar after Serge’s murder. Jenny swears she isn’t and is able to prove it (to a degree, anyway) to Moreau. When Jenny learns that Gena has for years claimed to be the lead actress in The Divide, she is furious. That is the one thing Jenny has done of which she can legitimately be proud, and to have someone else take the credit is a violation. She’s more than a little curious about this apparent doppelgänger and starts poking around, and before long she has been talked into using her uncanny resemblance and supposed psychic powers by a friend of Gena’s, former actress and current wellness guru (Gwyneth Paltrow vibes) Boots Pontifex, to mingle with Gena’s and Serge’s circle of friends and hopefully figure out who killed Serge and what happened to Gena. Hollywood is full of unusual people and odd match-ups, and soon Jenny is hanging out with people like social media sensation MMP, Serge’s second wife the sculptor, the young actress who was to star in Serge’s next film (who would likely have been the next leading lady with whom he’d have had an affair), and a couple of people whom she knew during the filming of The Divide who were still in Serge’s orbit. Is one of them a killer? Where is Gena, and what can explain her uncanny resemblance to Jenny? Can Jenny figure out this situation and, if she does, will she become the next victim?
A quirky twist on Hollywood thrillers of the past, The Divide gives the reader an unlikely but appealing protagonist in Jenny, a woman who has had her dreams of artistic success crushed not once but twice. She left Iowa behind and with it a horrific night that she has all but completely blocked from remembering. She’s not particularly proud of how she’s making a living, claiming to have psychic powers that she doesn’t actually possess (or does she?), but she needs to eat and this is (barely) paying her bills. Having the chance to revisit the most successful moment of her life and simultaneously rub shoulders with (and get paid by) some of the people who actually made it in this city of broken dreams is impossible to resist, and the reader gets an inside peek behind the curtains into lives behind social media posts and glowing media accolades. The characters are pure Hollywood, often over-the-top, and since any of them could in fact be a murderer it makes Jenny’s interactions with them all the more enjoyable to observe and dissect. This is part whodunnit and part psychological thriller, with the odd circumstance of Jenny and Gena’s parallel existences another conundrum to solve. Not every thread was tied up to my complete satisfaction, and the pace slowed down a bit in places, but overall it was a crafty and somewhat cinematic twist on the genre which I enjoyed. Readers of authors like Hank Phillippi Ryan, Katherine Wood and Alafair Burke might find this read up their alley, as would those who like a touch of LA/Hollywood to their mysteries. My thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Books for allowing me early access to this offbeat tale of deception and redemption.