Deeper darker psychological thrills!
Ever since I started to study psychological thriller writing, I’ve continued to seize opportunities to examine how the masters of the genre do it. 
Recently I’ve mentioned a couple of JP Delaney‘s novels on this blog, but in Believe Me he takes things one step further.
‘… a pitch-perfect psychological thriller’, Lee Child reckons! (Wouldn’t we all love to gain that particular accolade?)
Claire Wright is a 25 year old British actor, who since the age of eleven has been pretending to be someone other than an orphan girl who’s been in and out of foster homes, desperate to love and be loved. Her scholarship with the Actors Studio at Pace University in New York covers some of her tuition fees but not her living costs and here she is in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Her visa allows her to work as long as it’s not on the university campus, but she has no green card. So she takes a job working for a firm of divorce lawyers, posing as an easy pick-up in hotel bars in order to entrap errant husbands. She’s not proud of the work she does – breaking up families – but she is proud of how well she does it. She’s a consummate actor.
But then one of the men she’s supposed to expose as a cheat, Patrick Fogler, becomes chief suspect in a murder investigation. His wife is found brutally murdered in her hotel room soon after Claire meets her. He’s also known to have been in the vicinity of several other unsolved killings. 
What’s more, he’s an academic with a penchant for the macabre works of Charles Baudelaire, and many of the murders bear distinct overtones of the fate of women in his poetry. But there’s nothing definitive to provide concrete evidence of Fogler’s guilt.
Then Claire is offered an attractive deal by the police: take on a terrifying role as someone Patrick would be attracted to, in return for a green card … if she survives!! She agrees and it becomes an all-consuming role requiring her to completely submit to the part of the character she’s supposed to be. She attends some of Fogler’s lectures in order to start up a conversation and intrigue him, and they begin a tense relationship, both suspicious of the other, but becoming increasingly in thrall to each other. The whole enterprise takes her into dangerous and mind-bending places: into police custody, into prison and a psychiatric facility; deeper and deeper into the psyche and heart of Patrick, and the reader can’t be sure anything is as it appears.
It’s a tense and constantly spinning tale with so many twists and turns that I gave up trying to decide who was guilty, who was sane, who was real, who was play-acting, and just allowed the narrative to unspool. Because, convoluted and confusing and unreliable it may be, unsavoury and unsettling too, but it’s certainly cleverly constructed. I was intrigued to discover this is its second iteration, the first having flopped early on in Delaney’s career. This time round he’s definitely crackled it!
One particularly neat and unusual ploy adopted by the author is to record some scenes as scripts for a play, with instructions for the actors, and lines of dialogue, as if Claire as actress is picturing them in her head. It fits perfectly with the theme of the novel and the part acting plays in the whole story.
Oh, and the short chapters – 106 of them in less than 400 pages – do help those pages to keep turning.