Lead Review

  • Book: Believe Me
  • Location: New York City (NYC)
  • Author: J P Delaney

Review Author: tripfiction

Location

Content

It seems appropriate that, like the narrator of Believe Me, author J.P. Delaney is skilled at reinvention. As Anthony Capella he wrote luscious stories of food and romance to great acclaim. From his new pseudonym comes a second, highly anticipated thriller (which he acknowledges is an improved and revamped version of an earlier book, written as Tony Strong).

Claire Wright is a young British woman on a scholarship to the Actors Studio in New York, anxious to leave her troubled past behind. Unable to get a green card she supports herself by working cash in hand to entrap straying husbands. Matters escalate when one of her wealthy female clients is found murdered. Claire’s new role is to seduce the suspect – the victim’s husband – into a confession. He is Patrick Fogler, suave academic and translator of Baudelaire, and the subject matter of the poems in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, with their allusions to sadism and necrophilia, play an important part in the narrative. This is not a novel for the faint-hearted, but it is written so stylishly that it doesn’t feel excessive. The psychological games performed by the student actors during practice sessions work as a clever counterpoint to the psychological profiling that the police are employing to catch their killer.

The book is structured in more than a hundred short chapters, their brevity increasing the sense of pace and the reader’s compulsion to the turn the pages. It is also dialogue-heavy, many scenes written as if for a script, which reflects Claire’s obsession with performance and her desire to completely inhabit her part; Delaney writes with authority about the acting world. The novel has some moments which strain credulity – and a period in a psychiatric hospital which doesn’t convince – but there’s no shortage of unexpected twists and a very deliberate blurring of the lines of reality. It is almost impossible to know who is deceiving who and the tension never slackens.

The short chapters, the relatively small cast of characters, the wealth of dialogue over description all add to the unease and claustrophobic atmosphere, but as a result the setting itself can sometimes feel anonymous. Delaney is clearly familiar with Manhattan and its idiosyncrasies, the geography of its parks and northern reaches and the theatre district, but the city is very much a backdrop to his story. This may be due to the constraints of the genre (although the final few chapters, set in Paris, are very evocative) but as a compelling, edge-of-the-seat literary thriller, Believe Me succeeds spectacularly.

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