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.

The Divide reminded me of Catherine Steadman’s The Disappearing Act by way of Julie Clark’s The Last Flight, with a dash of Marisha Pessl’s Night Film. Jenny St. John, a struggling former actress turned fake psychic gets a visit from the police when her unbeknownst-to-her doppleganger, artist Gena Santos, has gone missing, after the murder of the director, Serge, of the only film credit on Jenny’s resume, who Gena married and then divorced. After ruling out that Jenny isn’t Gena, Jenny gets dragged into the search for who murdered Serge and what happened to Gena. As Jenny gets deeper and deeper in Gena’s life and inner circle, the more questions arise of what led Gena to take credit for Jenny’s role in the only film she appeared in, and why she disappeared, and who murdered Serge. And is Jenny next? Tense with mystery and deceit, in a town where everyone lies, this book built the suspense from the beginning up until the reveal at the end. The only thing that bothered me about the book is that all the questions we have aren’t properly answered.

The synopsis was intriguing but the book itself left a lot to be desired. Poorly written with one dimensional characters- I do not recommend this book.

The Divide pulled me in at the beginning of the story. The mystery of Jenny's doppelganger was interesting, and I was invested. However, I found my interest waning, and when the mystery is solved, it was not explained properly. It was just bizarre and glossed over too quickly. I was disappointed and not satisfied. The writing was good, and the storyline was interesting.

Thank you to the publisher for providing a digital copy.

This book was a joy to read. I enjoyed the way the story flowed and I had a few moments that kind of made me question a few things. The characters were very interesting and I had smile quite a few times. This author really knows how to tell a story that will captivate you from the very beginning. I highly recommend this book.

I thought the book came out strong. You have questions and are wondering what can happen. You quickly figure out that there isn’t too much to learn. I thought some of the decisions made by the FMC were a little crazy and not needed

I went into this book thinking I was not going to like. Turns out, I loved it. It was non stop story, without any unnecessary parts. It all added up. I was a bit taken back at the who dun it part, it was my last guess, actually.
It was very well written, and keeps you turning the pages. The start, is a tad slow, but it's well worth the read.
Thank you netgalley, the publisher and author for the ARC, for an honest review.

I had a great time while reading this! It drew me in from the beginning when we first met Jenny in her clinic getting ready to put on her psychic persona to make some cash. Then a Detective comes in and changes everything Jenny thought she knew.. There is a missing woman named Gena who is so eerily similar to Jenny that people think they are the same person. This intrigues Jenny for many reasons the first being as far as she knows she isn't related to Gena at all, second Gena has been telling everyone she meets that she was the lead in her ex-husband's first movie The Divide.. The only problem with that is Gena wasn't in the movie Jenny was... Why would Gena go around telling people that? Last but not least is that Gena is suspected of killing said ex-husband who should have known that she wasn't the one who starred in his movie but either he didn't which doesn't do Jenny's ego any good, or he did know and he didn't care that his wife was lying for some mysterious reason.

So Jenny heads off to dig up what she can about Gena, and ends up in the middle of her friend group, using her psychic abilities to figure out if one of them is a killer and track down what happened to Gena... I really liked that she walked into the group telling the truth about who she is.. not Gena and the one who really starred in the movie.. Which except for the fact they could be twins everyone takes in stride that Gena lied.

I loved Jenny as our main character. She is a survivor, and I loved watching her look into the case. As Jenny slowly uncovers things about Gena she ends up with more questions which kept me frantically turning the pages waiting for the ANSWERS!! I was both surprised and not by who the killer ended up being. I didn't see it coming but once it was all revealed it made sense. Most of the questions I had about Gena specifically weren't answered by the end so I would absolutely love another book following Jenny getting those answers and using her "psychic abilities" to look into more murders..