I could not get through this book fast enough! Believe Me is a creepy, dark and twisty thriller that will have you second guessing anything you think you've sussed out right until the end. There are some great twists that I did not see coming. The relationship between Claire and Patrick is a fascinatinly strange one. A gripping read with a very original story that you'll find hard to put down. Best to go into this one knowing as little as possible about it.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for a copy of this ebook in exchange for my honest review.

Oh wow!! Who is the murderer? Is there really a serial killer? This book will keep you up reading until the shocking ending. Who is lying and why? You will never really guess what has happened. The best psychological thriller of the year!! Fabulous concept and well researched themes. An amazing roller coaster of a read!!!

To ensure she can continue with her acting studies and pay the rent and without a green card, the only job open to Claire is to try and seduce married men in bars - sometimes with the wife’s knowledge, sometimes by bribing the men so their wives won’t find out. The night Claire is sent to seduce Patrick is the night her whole world changes. When at first the police suspect Claire and then later Patrick an undercover operation is set up but just who is the killer? A fantastic psychological thriller, with twist after twist, you are gripped until the final page. Excellent.

An absolutely fabulous book about cheating husbands,and the dark world of perversions linked to the author Baudelaire and his book Fleur du Mals. So well written and an improvement on the last book,The Girl Before,in my opinion.
Claire is employed as a decoy,by a firm of divorce attorneys. A suspicious wife who wants proof of her husband's infidelity contacts this firm and Claire is sent to gather the evidence and get the proof on video tape. There are rules in that the client must make a sexual proposition to Claire,and she doesn't act upon the proposition.
Claire is an aspiring actress,but doesn't have the required green card for employment in America,so this job is strictly cash in hand. Problems arise one night,when the wife of the man Claire is meeting,is later murdered and some cash is stolen. Initially a suspect,Claire is eventually persuaded to help the Police catch the murderer,by going undercover and getting close to the suspect to get a confession.
This turns into a dangerous game of cat and mouse,and the reader never knows which version of the truth to believe. Is Claire guilty of murder,or being set up by the man suspected of murdering his wife? Are the Police really on her side,or what is their ulterior motive?
A good murder mystery shouldn't be easily guessed,and this book excels in that respect,you are tempted to reread and check what clues were missed and red herrings accepted. Everybody I suspected turned out to be innocent! This is a really devious and fascinating read,and downright brilliant! I loved this book,and will buy this for family members who have a birthday in August. The truth is revealed early on in the book in a bold assertion,but it was well hidden!! This was a pleasure to review.
I have left a copy of this review on Goodreads today.

Took me a while to get into but once I did was absolutely gripped. Good story line keeps you guessing would recommend to friends,

A fantastic read. Thoroughly enjoyed this and it is not something I would usually pick up. Will look for more from this author in future.

I really enjoyed this book. Claire is a drama student living in New York. To earn some extra money she works for a law company setting up honey traps for women trying to prove their husband's infidelity. When a woman is found brutally murdered just after Claire has failed to entrap her husband, she finds herself being used by the police to try to prove that Patrick killed his wife. But just who is using who? Who is lying, and who exactly is the murderer? I changed my mind several times! This is a roller coaster of a read which will keep you guessing til the end. Thanks to NetGalley for a preview copy.
Copied to Goodreads.

Modern day murder mystery that makes you think about the people you meet and whether their words and actions are the truth or if it’s all an act. This book is so well written and will have you guessing until the end about who the murderer is. I couldn’t decide on who I thought the murderer was as any one of the main characters could have done it. Very cleverly written with twists and turns throughout! Highly recommend!

This book was not for me, I did not like the strong sexual side of the story. The methods being used to trap the suspected killer read like pornography. I stopped reading it before I was half way through. As well as the pornographic angle, I really didn't care about Claire, and found the whole premise unrealistic. Ultimately very disappointing.

Claire Wright is a budding British Actress, that is until she fell in love with her married co star turns out he didn’t feel the same so when the film was over so were they her reputation was ruined. She headed to New York Actors Studio where she got a scholarship but she didn’t get a green card to work. As the fees didn’t allow her living expenses she had to find some out of sight work.
That’s when she got caught by the authorities they offer her a way out, it’s very dangerous could cost her her life but if it worked out she would get her green card.
After reading The Girl Before I was excited about this book I found it a bit confusing at times and I was losing interest. I’m glad I stuck with it as I did really enjoy it once it got going. An excellent read.

This book held so much promise. I loved the idea of a sting operation and the characters were well- crafted. However I did find my attention wavering at about the 2/3 mark, I’m not sure why. I ended up skipping a few chapters and flicking to the end, ng I hate doing.

I really enjoyed this book. I didn't really know what to expect, but it turns out, I really enjoyed this book.

Int. New York, Meet Claire, who is a struggling looking to find a way to exist without a green card. This leads her to do some dubious things in order to earn her keep and stay to pursue her passion of becoming an actress. Let's not lie. Claire is broken. As an orphan she craves attention, needs reassurance, needs the constant applause of acceptance. But Claire is broken in other ways too. Claire's whole life plays out like a movie/tv/stage script in her head, so be prepared for odd little aspects that you wouldn't normally see in a book.

Int. New York Bar, Claire on assignment meets the very interesting Patrick Folger. Patrick is not who Claire thought he'd be, a College professor with a speciality in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, a dark and sinister set of poems that have the potential for tragedy.

I don't really know where to start, there were so many twists and turns that when I thought I had it figured out, I really didn't, or I did, and I just didn't know I did. The book is well read, the characters well defined, you are rooting for them, and you hate them all at the same time. For anyone who likes psychological thrillers this is a book for you. A whodunnit that will flip your mind around.

Ext. Heading to a bookstore to buy JP Delaney's first book, because if it's anything like this, it's worth a read.

I really don’t know where to start with this one ....... it really takes you on a journey full of twists and turns. It’s a book that gets inside your head and you really don’t know where you are heading.

It all revolves around Claire, a British wannabe actress that has escaped to the US to run from some issues in her past. Due to the lack of a green card, she is unable to work until she comes across a law firm that hire her to seduce cheating husbands. All is going well until she meets a husband that doesn’t fall for her charms, and then wakes up to be in the centre of a murder investigation.

This is where the book starts to come into its own, with twists and turns galore, until you really have no idea who did what and who really is telling the truth. This book had me wanting more all the way until the final pages, I just had to know the truth.

If you love your psychological thrillers you definitely will not be disappointed with this book. A definite page turner with the emphasis on psychological !!!!

Thank you to Quercus books and NetGalley for a digital copy of this book.

I found this new psychological thriller by JP Delaney to be a much darker novel than The Girl Before. The principal character and narrator, Claire, is a British drama student in New York and she becomes entangled in a murder investigation, through her honey-trap role of posing as an easy pickup in hotels and bars to entrap straying husbands.
The plot revolves around the fact that the main suspect is an academic expert on a set of French poems, Les Fleurs du Mal, by Charles Beaudelaire, which involves some unpleasant sado-masochism. I found these ‘crime-noir’ elements a little overwhelming and distracted slightly from the psychological build-up of the relationship between Claire and all the other characters.
The novel is fast paced, with a few flashback incidents, which builds up an intense atmosphere from which it is difficult to know who to believe.

I believe many readers of thrillers will find this a great read and delight in the unexpected climax.

Wow. This book was stunning. In fact, it was so good that I'm struggling to know what to write, other than that you really should head straight to a bookshop on 26th July and purchase a copy for yourself!

Imagine if you had faced a tragic life and had finally found the place you belong (in the case of this character, an acting school in NYC) but were at risk of having to leave due to financial pressures and lack of a green card. What would you do? What choices might you make?

Delaney skilfully weaves Claire's desperation alongside the literary obsession of her target Patrick to create a mystery that will leave you guessing until the end. Perhaps towards the final pages the book had lost some of the excitement and intrigue that had been present at the start, but what a fun journey! I especially admired the use of screenplay directions within the text to really give the sense of just how much Claire loves acting.

Is she a murderer? Is everything she does part of her acting persona? You'll have to read to find out!

Having read this author’s first book, The Girl Before, I was intrigued to receive a review copy of Believe Me from NetGalley.
Like JP Delaney’s earlier book this is a clever thriller with an interesting premise. Claire Wright is a penniless English actress studying in New York, taking jobs that are off the grid to earn a bit of extra cash.
Working for ex detective Henry, she is paid cash to entrap wayward husbands in bars. Convincing them to sleep with her so that their wives who suspect bad behaviour, can divorce them.
Whilst doing this she tries to catch Patrick Fogler who, somewhat surprisingly, resists her advances. Patrick is a university professor who is obsessed with Baudelaire’s poetry, Les Fleurs Du Mal.
After she meets Stella, his wife, in order to pick up her payment, Stella is brutally murdered. Who has done it? Is it Patrick or even Claire herself?
The police ask Claire to use her acting talent to discover whether Patrick is guilty. She is forced to start. a relationship with him in order to honey trap him and get him to reveal himself as a serial killer.
She must pull off the best acting performance of her career but is Patrick really guilty? As she begins to fall in love with him she is not so sure.
There are lots of twists and turns in this novel which keep the reader guessing until the very end.
The Baudelaire references were plentiful and as I studied him at uni many years ago I found them an interesting reminder of my French studies. However I’m not sure how much interest this would generate in those who have barely heard of this nineteenth century French poet. I must admit that despite my interest I did skip few quotations myself!
There were also a lot of stage directions in the novel which did jar slightly and slow down the narrative. It was almost as if you were reading a play.
However, overall it was an enjoyable read and I would have no hesitation recommending it.

Oh my goodness!

Having read JP Delaney’s first novel The Girl Before I was very excited to be given an ARC from Netgalley and the publisher Quercus.

I just couldn’t put this down, and found it very pacey and twisty. Containing characters I didn’t know whether to love, hate, trust or not left my head in a spin. I won’t write a synopsis for this book, as there are many around - Believe Me when I say, just read it!

Meanwhile I just can’t wait to read the third Delaney book but I guess I’ll have to wait a year....

An ambitious, aspiring, young actress gets involved in a murder case and finds herself in a spiralling nightmare.
She wants to be believed as she proclaims her innocence, but since she sees her life in terms of scenes from a script, sometimes rewritten with different actions and endings, it is difficult to determine what is real and what is imaginary drama.
It is a corkscrew of a tale and right up to the end, I could not decide who was guilty or innocent, who was lying or telling the truth and just how much of the action was real or acting. This is a tense, psychological thriller, which cleverly keeps you guessing right up to the end, swaying back between innocence and guilt. This is a genuinely unusual novel.
I would like to thank the author and publishers for an advance copy of the book, in exchange for an honest opinion.

I absolutely loved The Girl Before and gave it five stars. Sadly I found this novel to be lacking. The writing itself was good but the story just didn’t gel. The characters were unlikeable and I just found it too unbelievable..

Well, this was a little weird. In a good way, I hasten to add; it really did keep me guessing. It was a cat and mouse game all the way through, the journey to the end being dark and twisted throughout.
British wanabe actress Claire has moves stateside to attend a prestigious acting course in NYC. She only has a student visa which limits the amount of work she can do which inevitable means she is always hard up for cash, perennially owing her roommate rent. So, she does what many others have done before, she finds an off-the-books job, and is working, cash in hand, for an law firm investigator in honey traps, filming married men as they come on to her to provide evidence in divorce suits. To be honest, she's pretty good at what she does until, one day, she fails to engage her latest mark, Patrick Fogler. Even worse, the night of her attempt, Fogler's wife Stella, who Claire had broken with tradition and actually met prior to the assignment, is later found dead in her hotel room. Obviously, Claire gets embroiled into the murder investigation and loses her job. But not just that, she also becomes a suspect. With no money now coming in and also with the finger of suspicion pointed at her, she reluctantly agrees to use her skills as an actress to assist the police in their attempts to pin both this murder, and maybe a few others, on Folger; their number one suspect. As time moves on and the investigation proceeds, strange things start occurring to Claire. Is she really working for the police or are they actually working her?
In this book, Folger is an academic, specialising and indeed being a bit obsessed with the works of Charles Baudelaire; specifically his previously banned Les Fleurs du Mal poems which contain some very dark narratives on unhealthy and rather erotic relationships. I did find this side of things a bit too heavy going for me personally but, as they were key to what was happening, I tried to embrace them. Another thing that was a bit different to the norm was the way that certain scenes were played out in script format. I guess because Claire was an actress, maybe the author felt the need to keep reminding the reader of this fact throughout, maybe just to reinforce the idea that Claire was indeed playing a part. Highlighting the fact that she may not be the most reliable of narrators.
As things progress with the story, it becomes evident that things may not quite be as they seem on face value. Claire gets in all sorts of trouble as more evidence and supposition comes to light. Getting help later on from an unlikely source. And then things get even weirder for all involved and it becomes a bit of a race against time to get to the bottom of things once and for all.
I do have to admit to being pretty much clueless for most of the book. I had so many scenarios flitting around my head, possible theories and outcomes but I never managed to settle on anything completely credible. When all was revealed, when the truth did eventually come to light, I sat back with the benefit of hindsight and saw so many things that I had missed or dismissed along the way. If I had been reading a physical copy, I would probably have been flicking back to double check but it's not that easy with an ebook; shame that. Along with that though, there were still quite a few things that were left unresolved for me. Maybe I missed something else but, when I finished, there was just something that didn't quite sit right with me. Maybe the fact that this is based on a previously published novel, the premise of which the author has revisited, reworked and republished - it could be a factor; I don't know.
And the characters... well, they were hard to fathom out for obvious reasons you will discover as you read. All the main players are delightfully complex, their truths and motives not being apparent for the majority of the book. As with all books of this genre, there are many secrets and lies to be found throughout, served with a very generous side-order of duplicitous behaviour. All making it quite hard to connect to any of them.
All in all, a very intriguing plot, the execution of which just fell a little short for me. I see from other reviews that the jury is still out so I guess this is probably going to be one of this year's big marmite books! My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read it.