Believe Me
by JP Delaney
A struggling actor, a Brit in America without a green card, Claire needs work and money to survive. Then she gets both. But nothing like she expected.
Claire agrees to become a decoy for a firm of divorce lawyers. Hired to entrap straying husbands, she must catch them on tape with their seductive propositions.
The rules? Never hit on the mark directly. Make it clear you’re available, but he has to proposition you, not the other way around. The firm is after evidence, not coercion. The innocent have nothing to hide.
Then the game changes.
When the wife of one of Claire’s targets is violently murdered, the cops are sure the husband is to blame. Desperate to catch him before he kills again, they enlist Claire to lure him into a confession.
Claire can do this. She’s brilliant at assuming a voice and an identity. For a woman who’s mastered the art of manipulation, how difficult could it be to tempt a killer into a trap?
But who is the decoy . . . and who is the prey?
❃❃Believe Me releases July 24th❃❃
Kobo
Momma Says: 2 stars⭐⭐
An unreliable narrator, a storyline that is both twisted and twisty, and a cat and mouse game that you're never quite sure of who's the cat. All of these should've made for an intense and exciting psychological thriller, except it didn't. Part of that can be attributed to the many times the story is written like a script, including stage directions. Not the whole book, but quite a lot of it. I get it, our narrator is an actress who fully immerses herself into her role, but the back and forth between novel and script was distracting and for me, a nuisance. Nevertheless, the story manages to hold its own for awhile. The premise, while intriguing, is completely unrealistic, but this is fiction, so I kept going. About the halfway mark, it starts going downhill and not only becomes somewhat confusing at times, but becomes more and more unbelievable until the conclusion, which threw it way past unrealistic and into the realm of ludicrous. A dark story with lots of twists and packed full of unreliable characters is usually something I can get behind, but in the end, the cons far outweighed the pros on this one.
❃❃ARC provided by NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine
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