We are all in varying degree not quite what we seem.
--Believe Me, JP Delaney
After purchasing Believe Me, by JP Delaney, I put the novel aside for a time while I forced my way through Trisurya (Liu Cixin) and continued my slow though very enjoyable crawl through the 900 pages of Kronik Burung Pegas (Haruki Murakami), for I knew that once I started with Believe Me, I would read it straight through.
Claire, a Brit without a Green Card, needs work and money to survive while she rather obsessively pursues an acting career on Broadway--and a natural talent for acting is indeed the one thing she has going for her, the one thing she can use to fill the gaps and sustain her quest.
Then again ... is she really acting at all?
Finding it difficult to find lucrative work, given her lapsed visa status, Clair occasionally hires herself out to a somewhat disreputable law firm to play the bait in sting operations designed to entrap cheating husbands, and it is through this employment that she becomes coincidentally involved in a particularly grisly murder.
Then again, is it really coincidence?
Well, from there it gets a lot more complicated. A whole lot more complicated.
Delaney is the author of an earlier psycho-thriller, The Girl Before, and like The Girl Before, Believe Me, filled with cleverly fashioned intrigues and twists, hits the suspense target dead on; and while it's at it, manages to make some keenly insightful observations about women and men and love and trust, about useful illusions and dangerous delusions.
Most of all though, as the narrative itself puts it, it's a story about a man and a woman trying to guess each other's motives. To work out what's really going on inside the other's mind. What would I really see, if I could look into your heart?
There's nothing I like better than a novel that fulfills the expectations of genre and at the same time feeds the serious reader's thirst for deeper meaning. In my mind, Delaney ticks both boxes here.
--Believe Me, JP Delaney
After purchasing Believe Me, by JP Delaney, I put the novel aside for a time while I forced my way through Trisurya (Liu Cixin) and continued my slow though very enjoyable crawl through the 900 pages of Kronik Burung Pegas (Haruki Murakami), for I knew that once I started with Believe Me, I would read it straight through.
Claire, a Brit without a Green Card, needs work and money to survive while she rather obsessively pursues an acting career on Broadway--and a natural talent for acting is indeed the one thing she has going for her, the one thing she can use to fill the gaps and sustain her quest.
Then again ... is she really acting at all?
Finding it difficult to find lucrative work, given her lapsed visa status, Clair occasionally hires herself out to a somewhat disreputable law firm to play the bait in sting operations designed to entrap cheating husbands, and it is through this employment that she becomes coincidentally involved in a particularly grisly murder.
Then again, is it really coincidence?
Well, from there it gets a lot more complicated. A whole lot more complicated.
Delaney is the author of an earlier psycho-thriller, The Girl Before, and like The Girl Before, Believe Me, filled with cleverly fashioned intrigues and twists, hits the suspense target dead on; and while it's at it, manages to make some keenly insightful observations about women and men and love and trust, about useful illusions and dangerous delusions.
Most of all though, as the narrative itself puts it, it's a story about a man and a woman trying to guess each other's motives. To work out what's really going on inside the other's mind. What would I really see, if I could look into your heart?
There's nothing I like better than a novel that fulfills the expectations of genre and at the same time feeds the serious reader's thirst for deeper meaning. In my mind, Delaney ticks both boxes here.
2 comments:
You seem to be attracting odd comments lately.
Mb--Lol. Yes. This one at least made some effort to pretend he or she had actually read at least a small piece from the blog, unlike "Jason", who simply copies and pastes the same damn advertisement shotgun fashion to dozens of entries.
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