Believe Me... Nothing is What it Seems (or is it?) --review

One thing I’ve always loved about mountains is the abundance of twisty, narrow, little roads with all those hairpin curves, winding their way up and around and up… and entirely at their own pace (well, at the pace set by those souls who originally cut, blasted, and paved the treacherous paths, in the first place,,, but you get my meaning, I’m sure).

That predilection for twisty things carries over to tales of suspense. I like to wonder what’s around the next bend… and the next page turn. 

But, if mountain roads were like mazes—with endless wrong turns and wasted energies leading absolutely nowhere—I wouldn’t like them nearly so much. 

The same holds true of mysteries. When an author fashions psychological twists into maddening dead ends over and over (and over) again, at some point I grow weary of following along; there has to be some sort of payoff, here and there, to maintain enough commit to follow all of that incessant winding and meandering to the end.  

And, in Believe Me, author JP Delaney comes thisclose to me hurling myself off a precipice (erm, in a manner of speaking)… because those infernal switchbacks go too far, more often rendering the tale an exasperating maze than a fun ride to the mountaintop.

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Claire is trying her best to make do… a young Brit struggling to land acting jobs in The Big Apple (made considerably harder by dint of her being all sorts of illegal, having neither a green card nor any official acting affiliations), and filling in the gaps with other, paying jobs (mostly ranging from tawdry to not-quite-as-tawdry).

One of her less-sketchy forms of employment involves a degree of acting: she works part-time for a firm whose (predominately female) clients want to find out whether or not their spouses are cheating. Claire’s job? To make herself out to be a call girl, recording any wannabe cheaters propositioning her so the wives have some solid proof to use as leverage. (Yeah, it’s kinda sleazy, but rent money is rent money.)

Things head south in a big way, though, when one of the clients ends up dead… savagely murdered in the hotel room where, just hours earlier, she’d met with Claire and Claire’s boss to get the report on her hubby Patrick.

Claire—cunning actress, beautiful enchantress, and poorer-than-a-churchmouse illegal about to lose her apartment (thus, desperate to avoid both spending any time on the streets AND being deported)—is a prime suspect, because the dead woman had also been robbed of a considerable sum of money.

Of course, the professor hubby—inheriting everything his wealthy wife left behind, and with his professional expertise in (and fondness for) the controversial, brutal works of Baudelaire—is put under the same magnifying glass.

So, when a police detective and an FBI profiler put it to Claire that she either help them determine whether or not Patrick killed his wife (and possibly a string of other women)—or find herself on a fast econojet back to London (and all the problems and troubled past she’d left behind)—Claire buckles in for the performance of her life.

But… who is really being investigated, here? Is Claire actually guilty? Is Patrick? Or is someone else—possibly in the BDSM world—behind everything? And, for that matter, who is the mysterious FBI profiler, really, and what’s her game?

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As I said earlier, Believe Me is a tough call, because there’s certainly much to like about it. The characters are brought to vibrant life (even if we don’t know who we can trust, right down to our narrator, Claire), and behave in ways that mostly feel true to what we know or see.

I also enjoyed the frequent passages in which Claire pictures everything as a script, from the scene and setting cues to the dialogue. (It would get old very quickly if a lot of authors employed this little schtick, but here, it works quite well indeed.)

And, when the end finally comes, it does make sense… for everything we know (or realize we already knew, or already thought/suspected). 

The problem for me—and this was a big one—is that Delaney uses too many false leads, obviously manipulating and willing the reader to think the wrong thing, time and time again. (Remember how I began? Twists are good, but too many wrong turns or dead ends become tiresome in a hurry. THAT.) Or, put another way, only my cat was around while I read Believe Me, but I'm pretty sure if he spoke "human", he'd say I sighed rather more than normal. ;)

Bottom line? Since I really enjoyed Delaney’s earlier work, The Girl Before, I’ll be looking forward to the next tale to come from this author’s hand. As for Believe Me, the ending was worth putting up with a boatload of annoyances… but only just.

~GlamKitty