Believe Me

Believe Me by J.P. Delaney is a standalone psychological thriller published in 2018, his second novel following the success of The Girl Before. Delaney has noted he originally wrote an early version of the story years earlier under a different title, before substantially rewriting it from the ground up after his debut's breakout success.

Claire Wright is a British actress training at a prestigious method-acting studio in New York, scraping by without a green card and without the legitimate work that would come with one. To pay the bills, she takes a job most people would balk at: working as a decoy for a firm of divorce lawyers, entrapping unfaithful husbands by letting them proposition her on camera, never the other way around. It's morally murky work that suits her training surprisingly well - until one of her targets, Patrick, a Columbia professor and translator of Baudelaire's notoriously dark poetry, becomes the prime suspect when his wife is found brutally murdered. The police, convinced Patrick is guilty and worried he'll kill again, ask Claire to do what she does best: become someone else entirely, get close enough to Patrick to draw out a confession, and stay in character no matter what it costs her.

What makes this Secret Identity premise so unsettling is how thoroughly Delaney commits to Claire's method-acting background as a narrative device. The novel is written in a deliberately theatrical style, occasionally breaking into script format complete with stage directions, mirroring how Claire herself processes the events unfolding around her - she doesn't just play a role for Patrick, she becomes it, to the point where the line between performance and reality starts to blur for Claire as much as for the reader. That blurring builds into one of the more distinctive uses of an Unreliable Narrator in recent thriller fiction: not a narrator hiding facts so much as one who may not entirely know which version of herself is telling the truth at any given moment.

The Obsession & Desire at the heart of Claire and Patrick's relationship is genuinely unsettling rather than romantic in any conventional sense, complicated further by the Baudelaire poetry woven through the novel - dark, transgressive verse that Delaney uses as a recurring thematic mirror for both characters' contradictions. The Dark Secrets surrounding Patrick's wife's murder widen considerably as Claire digs deeper, and the Mystery and Secrets Revealed keeps shifting who readers are meant to trust, in a structure explicitly compared by reviewers to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl.

The Twist Ending has proven genuinely divisive - Delaney takes the story in a direction several reviewers have described as a significant departure from where the setup seems to be heading, and reception splits fairly evenly between readers who find the final stretch a bold, earned payoff and those who feel it asks for more suspension of disbelief than the rest of the book has built toward.

For readers drawn to psychologically slippery thrillers with narrators who blur the line between performance and truth, Believe Me offers a genuinely unusual structural gimmick in service of real suspense - and a fittingly ambiguous answer to the question its title poses.