A gripping read. The characters are all totally plausible and the storyline holds water better than most similar tales that depend partly on an old real case. The timeline switches are clearly signposted and help with the development of the underlying story. Originality out of an old tale is difficult but JPD manages it very well and keeps up the highly strung tension until the last page.

This is a great read! Its face paced and exciting. I would recommend this book as I read it very quickly. Thank you for the opportunity to read it I will look for more by this author.

An entertaining psychological thriller. A must read for those who enjoy dark, clever and twisty thrillers.

Oh man where do I even start with this book? From the very first chapter I was completely hooked and ended up finishing this book within 48 hours. This book is sexy, suspenseful and surprising throughout and I thoroughly enjoyed it. One of my favourite things about this book are the short chapters and the fact that it’s often set out in the format of a script which I found very unique and made it a lot more interesting to read. This is also very relevant to the story as the main character Claire is an enthusiastic actress.

I frequently found myself on the edge of my seat and I really had no idea what was about to happen. I really love when I can’t guess the ending of thrillers and this book definitely had that going for it! It’s a great thriller and it’s definitely up there with my favourites.

I really enjoyed this book and found the storytelling different from the normal page turners we see hyped. I enjoyed the character of Claire quite a lot and was invested in her outcome. This one kept me guessing the whole way through. Five stars!

Thanks Netgalley and the Publisher. A dark and twisted thriller that lured me into the story and captured my thoughts until the very last page. Great read

'I'm just an actress. I wanted to stand on stage and have people applaud me. How on earth did I get into this?
Claire Wright likes to play other people.
A British drama student, in New York without a green card, Claire takes the only job she can get: working for a firm of divorce lawyers, posing as an easy pick-up in hotels bars to entrap straying husbands.
Never hit on them directly, she's told. We're after evidence not entrapment. The innocent have nothing to fear.
That's the theory anyway. But Claire is so good at this, she rarely fails to get her man.
When one of her targets becomes the subject of a murder investigation, the police ask Claire to use her acting skills to help lure their suspect into a confession. But right from the start, she has doubts about the part she's being asked to play. Is Patrick Fogler really a killer....or the only decent husband she's ever met? And is there more to this set-up than she's being told?
And that's when Claire realises she's playing the deadliest role of her life...
.
OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS BOOK!! I love The Girl Before but this one is even better!!!! I loved all of the characters, the plotline and the outcome 😱 twists and turns all the way through kept me guessing and I finished it in pretty much one sitting!! What a stunning book....can't wait for the next one now!!

Actors are a weird bunch (apparently), but our Claire is a whole new level of weirdo entirely. A Brit, who ran to America to escape her turbulent past, heart aches and a scandal. But no matter how many times her background came up, I couldn’t help but think, something’s really fishy there. Somehow there was always someone out there to get her, take her down, ruin her life. Now, living in America on a student visa, Claire is working for some law firm, pretending to seduce cheating husbands and record it all for evidence. As she’s not allowed to work on a student visa, this is of course all illegal, but nobody seems to think that this is a problem.

One of the obvious rules of the job is, that she’s not supposed to actually hit on the client’s husband. But on her last assignment she ends up reading some Baudelaire poem with the mark for like ten minutes, and instantly her panties are melting and she’s pretty much in love with the dude who in turn couldn’t care less. So when the dude’s wife ends up murdered, and the police first accuses Claire of killing the woman, then a bit later recruits her to seduce the husband because surely he’s the killer, in fact might be also a serial killer, and work for them undercover, or else they will deport her back to the UK, she’s like “Oh, hell yeah, I kinda liked the dude anyway, he’s really hot with that french poetry of his!“

If I said Claire is an unreliable narrator, that’d be the understatement of the year. You see, there’s unreliable, and there’s utterly insane. At times I was wondering if she’s actually able to tell fantasy apart from reality, or is it just me missing something. Anything she said happened to her just sounded dodgy, and all the twists and turns the story took just made the whole mess even more confusing and crazy sounding. She viewed her life like it was a Hollywood movie, and the formatting in places resembled a movie script. It was never quite clear whether some of those scenes actually happened or just played out in her head. The lovely Claire was certainly a bit unhinged, and all that waffling about her being such a great actress that she just turns into her role so much that she believes she’s someone else sounded way too far fetched, exactly because of all the cray-cray stuff that seemed to happen to her. Nah, this bitch is insane…

First of all, let me just say, the whole story smelled like bullshit to me. Considering the genre, I expected something at least remotely realistic, so when I found myself doubting the whole set up, I actually did a few hours of research to see if this kind of shit where the police uses untrained civilians for undercover operations really happens. The answer? The fact that nothing supporting the theory actually turned up suggests that the answer is most likely no. After hours worth of search on Google, in my police procedures reference book (US version) and half a weekend spent watching some true crime documentaries I’d say it’s not something that would ever happen in real life, more like in a Mexican soap opera.

Or did she just imagine this whole thing?

As I started this book I thought that it was going to be one which was "not for me", however, I'm very glad that I persisted! After a chapter or two it morphed into an engaging page-turner, taking you on an unpredictable journey and allowing you to become immersed into a compelling, if slightly far-fetched, world.

Description was detailed and the characterisation allowed for a fairly immersive experience. If I were to criticise it would be the rather superfluous use of "stage setting" quotes - I found them confusing and rather unnecessary.

This isn't a book for those who don't want to be challenged and are not comfortable reading about the darker side life. For those who find the "50 Shades" series subject matter an abomination, you'll find this more uncomfortable. For those who don't mind being made to feel slightly uncomfortable, both in terms of subject matter and your own feelings towards your engagement with the story, I'd urge you to give it a go.

WIth thanks to the author and publisher for the advance copy, through NetGalley.

What a thrilling unputdownable book. The book kept me guessing throughout and I could not put it down until I was finished. The whole concept of trust allowed for some ingenious plot twists. I love this author already and off to buy her next book

After reading The Girl Before I was really excited to read another one of JP Delaney's books and he has written yet another astonishingly twisted thriller. Believe Me focuses on a young actress who gets caught up in a very weird game - she sets honey traps for cheating husbands, but soon it gets much darker than that.

Yes, it's a bit ludicrous, and you need to seriously suspend your disbelief to go along with the idea that the FBI would enlist the help of an outsider to catch a serial killer. But if you can do that then this is a great read which will keep you guessing.

(Strangely, the plot was very similar to another book I read recently, whose title is also very similar to JP Delaney's last book - The Woman Before You by Carrie Blake - but thankfully this was a lot better)

Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Claire Wright likes to play other people, she is a struggling British actress, in New York without a green card and Claire needs work. She takes the only part she is offered: as a decoy for a firm of divorce lawyers, hired to entrap straying husbands, catching them on tape with their seductive propositions. The rules? Never hit on them directly. The firm is after evidence, not entrapment. The innocent should have nothing to hide. Then the game changes. When the police start investigating one of Claire’s targets for murdering his wife, they ask her to help lure their suspect into a confession.
Oh my goodness my head was all over the place with this book! This is some seriously mind-boggling stuff. Delaney throws in more twists than I could keep track of, just when one is revealed and dealt with, there is another sprung on us. Yes, some of them are more obvious than others but they all ensure for intoxicating reading and I absolutely loved every page of this book. This is definitely my favourite thriller of 2018! So far anyway.
I adored how Delaney wrote this, we follow Claire on her journey, following her as she struggles to make ends meet in New York, working for the divorce lawyers and how she ended up working with the police. This allows us to understand and develop a relationship with Claire, which I did very quickly, and then see her in the desperate situation she finds herself in. Claire does not know who she can trust and neither does the reader, this book is very addictive reading. Delaney has a lot of red herrings throughout this book and it really played with my mind after a while, I found myself lost in the maze of this book, desperately trying to get out and work out the resolution. I cannot emphasise enough how thrilling and shocking the book is as a whole and how wonderfully shocking the twists are.
Claire really is the perfect character for this, as I said I quickly developed a relationship with her but even after this, I could still see she is flawed and damaged, she comes across very human and it is only too easy to empathise with her as we learn the truth. This book is all about twists and what the truth is and it is no different with the characters, again we are unsure which characters we can trust and this only adds to the mind boggling mix.
‘Believe Me’ is a stonker of a thriller, I could not get enough of this and have not stopped recommending it. Even if you do not usually read thrillers, pick this one up, you will not regret it.
Thank you to NetGalley and Quercus Books for an advance copy.

This was without a doubt the craziest and most grossly unrealistic book I have ever read and I loved every second of it.

Claire is a struggling British actress living in New York City willing to stop at nothing to achieve her dreams (and pay the rent). Unable to get a real job due to her visa restrictions, Claire lands the role of a lifetime… luring married men to agree to affairs and catching it on film. But that’s where things get a little tricky. What happens when one man turns her down and his wife turns up dead the next day? Claire finds herself embroiled in the investigation, teaming up with the NYPD/FBI to put her acting skills to the test and bait out a dead woman’s killer. The rest as they say is not history but a mad collection of many, many, many twists and turns that will leave you wondering: what’s real? (and probably a nice helping of whiplash on top because damn, there’s a lot of twists and I’m still getting my head around it).

Steeped heavily in references to Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Delaney opens up an interesting dialogue on the influence of literature and media on its recipients and their actions. Can books really turn people into a psycho serial killer? In this case, it can. Sinister, alluring and complex you don’t know where this book or the killer will go next. Nothing is ever what it seems and there’s no straight road to the truth. Who can you trust? Claire is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Are we just falling for her act or is she really just a marionette on some strings? Paul is the grieving widow. Are we just falling for his sad sob story or is there really something darker beneath the surface? Delaney keeps you guessing right up until the very (explosive) end. This book may not be everyone’s cup of tea but this is one rollercoaster journey you don’t want to miss.

I was attracted to reading this book as I loved the previous novel by J P Delaney, The Girl Before. It turns out that this book was actually his first book. However, he totally rewrote it, keeping just the overall premise of the book before republishing after the success of The Girl Before.

Claire is playing a dangerous game - not only does she not have a green card to work in the USA she's staring in her own show over and over again to entrap straying husbands. For the first few chapters of the book I felt a little sick, scared for Claire of what could happen to her in what I felt was a dangerous game.

That was only the beginning though. Suddenly Claire is part of a murder investigation, is she a suspect? Maybe if she plays a part again she can clear her name. By this point in the novel I had to distance myself from Claire otherwise I would not have been able to read the book, scared of the danger she has placed herself into.

Once I had settled myself into Claire's new role things began to settle down and then the tables turned, everything I had read was put into doubt. Several more twists and turns abound until really I couldn't take anymore and just wanted to know what was real and what was acting

Really I should have known that Claire is always the actress......

Be prepared for a roller coaster of a ride to rethink what you think you know and what the author wants you to know!

I'm giving this book 4 out of five stars. My thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of this book.

Where do I start.. The plot was so far fetched it could have been a fantasy.
I lost the will to live after 50%.
One of a few books I have been unable to finish this year.
That says it all really.

A real rollercoaster of a read. Lots of twists and turns. Clever writing makes for such a gripping read. 4 stars from me. My thanks to the publisher & NetGalley for the advance reader copy.

I struggled to get through this book,. The story is about Claire, a British girl who is now in the USA wanting to work as an actress but doesn't have the right paperwork to get a job. She starts working as a decoy by a firm trying to catch errant husbands out.

The plot has got plenty of twist and turns but too much bondage, BDSM, crude language and sexual violence for me to enjoy even one page of it. Aside from all that I found the script style of writing very irritating and the use of Baudelaire's erotic poetry pretentious.

Not for me and an author to out ion my 'do not read list'.

This was quite an interesting thriller, with a unique plot. There were so many twists and turns, I wasn't quite sure what was happening. I did enjoy this book, however I preferred the author's previous book, as this was a little confusing at times.

This was a twisty tale that had me mistrusting and second guessing everyone and everything I was told. Thrillers aren't a genre I go for often, so when I do I expect them to be different and keep me guessing. Believe Me certainly delivered on that, and kept me hooked until I found out the truth. I flew through it pretty quickly, and the few times I felt a lull in the plot, a twist quickly came along to pull me back in.

This book starts out feeling like a very predictable thriller. Aside from coming from the perspective of an actress, which I felt was new, we have a murdered wife, a suspect husband, and the burly detective who's attracted to the female investigator - in this case, our actress, Claire. But the surprises start coming when the undercover investigation begins, and I soon got wrapped up in the story. There's also some interesting formatting, as Claire often imagines her life as a film, leading to scenes written out like a script.

In psychological thrillers like this I usually rely on the character to feed revelations to me, but with our main character Claire being such an erratic and paranoid person I found it hard to trust what she said. Having an unreliable narrator made it quite interesting trying to follow the truth, and I was left feeling like the only way to get real answers would be to finish the book. I was right - the twists keep coming right up until the end. Despite this, I felt like after everything the book went back to the same predictable points I had initially spotted.

While I enjoyed the plot, I found myself annoyed by a few things - namely the characters. I thought they were all pretty one-dimensional; Claire was a neurotic, attention-seeking actress, her handler Kathryn was bitchy and work-obsessed, and then you had Henry and Frank, a typical ex-cop and typical detective. Claire was probably the most annoying of all - she says several eye roll-inducing things, the worst of all being "I'm not like other people. I'm just not."

Despite the issues I had, this book was fast-paced, interesting, and kept me guessing the whole way through. It's a quick easy read, and a good way to spend an afternoon.

Thanks to Net Galley and Quercus Books for an ARC of this book in exchange for a review.
Another psychological thriller from JP Delaney. Fast paced with lots of twists.
Claire is certainly a performer, at the start of the book she is a struggling actress has no green card, is taking acting classes and working for a law firm catching cheating husbands. That’s how she meets Patrick, though he chats to her he leaves the bar alone, leaving her with the book he was reading. A few hours later his wife Stella is found dead in her hotel room and a large sum of money is missing from her belongings. Who killed her? Is Patrick the serial killer the police psychologist thinks he is? Claire found him attractive and charming.
I got a little tired of Baudelaire’s poems and for me the ending was not believable. An enjoyable twisty read though 3.5 stars.