May 1, 2018
The unreliable-narrator craze continues with Delaney's (The Girl Before, 2017) new thriller.A disgraced British actress named Claire Wright comes to the United States, sans green card, looking for work. Her agent gives her the bad news. "The days we took the huddled masses yearning to be free are long over." She ends up working for a divorce lawyer, setting up stings to entrap unfaithful husbands by pretending to be a high-priced hooker. Then one of her prospective clients is found dead beneath a bloody sheet in a hotel room. Primary suspect: the woman's husband, a Columbia University professor and the translator of Baudelaire's book of S&M poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal. The police suspect he's a serial killer, with previous Baudelaire-inspired murders under his belt, ha ha. They have Claire go undercover to lure this guy into a confession. It's the role of her career, one she throws herself into so wholeheartedly she loses track of what is real and what is masquerade, ending up madly in love with her target. After many twists and pseudo-reveals, she ends up first in a mental institution and then with a starring role in My Heart Laid Bare, the suspected killer's off-Broadway show based on a nasty incident in the life of Baudelaire. "Who is the real Claire Wright? The one sitting here with her precious green card and permit in front of her, exchanging pleasantries with the man who provided it? Or the one who fell for the darkness she sensed deep inside the only man she couldn't seduce?" An unreliable-narrator setup works best when the character believes her own story or is lying intentionally to other characters in the book. When it mostly means that the narrator deliberately conceals key facts from the reader for no purpose other than to create confusion and suspense, it feels a little cheesy. The author confesses in an afterword that she wrote and published this book decades prior to last year's bestseller, The Girl Before, but it didn't do very well, so she's trying again with a rewrite.The best parts of this book were written in the middle of the 19th century by Charles Baudelaire.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 21, 2018
Delaney—a pseudonym for British adman Tony Strong—follows his debut, 2017’s bestselling The Girl Before, with a thriller undercut by a preposterous premise, cardboard characters, and arbitrary major plot reversals. For starters, readers are asked to buy the NYPD’s exploiting British actress Claire Wright’s lack of a green card to strong-arm her into a lengthy undercover operation designed to trap Patrick Fogler, a Columbia University English professor specializing in Baudelaire, who’s suspected of sadistically murdering several women, including his wealthy wife, Stella, according to scenarios inspired by poems from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. Once Claire and Patrick embark on their dangerous danse macabre—all the while with Det. Frank Durban and profiler Kathryn Latham listening in—the kinky mind games begin in earnest. Could Claire herself, who briefly met Stella the night she was killed, actually be the investigation’s target? For those willing to completely suspend disbelief, the author produces a bobsled run’s worth of twists. Agent: Caradoc King, United Artists (U.K.).

June 15, 2018

In this fast-paced psychological thriller, Claire Wright, a struggling British actress in America, makes ends meet by entrapping cheating husbands for a law firm. When a target's wife is found murdered, Claire is forced into another assignment--work with the police to obtain a confession from the husband, Patrick, or risk being exposed as an illegal immigrant. As she grows closer to Patrick, Claire begins to question the game she has to play. It seems that no one is being completely honest with her and, with her passion for acting coupled with her dodgy background, Claire's not completely trustworthy either. While there are some distinctive elements, this ultimately hits all the expected marks. The pseudonymous Delaney mentions in the afterword that this is a reworking of a novel previously published in 2001 under a different title (Tony Strong's The Decoy). VERDICT A solid pick from best-selling author Delaney (The Girl Before) for readers who enjoyed the paranoia factor in A.J. Finn's The Woman in the Window or the unreliable narrator of Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train. The domestic thriller trend is showing no signs of slowing. Buy accordingly.--Anitra Gates, Erie Cty. P.L., PA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2018
This second psychological thriller (following The Girl Before, 2017) from the pseudonymous Delaney (aka Tony Strong) is likely to follow its predecessor's path straight to the international best-seller lists. Despite a slightly far-fetched plot, it is a compelling read. Claire Wright is a struggling British actor in New York City without a green card, desperate enough for work and money to become a decoy for a law firm, seducing errant husbands and delivering tapes of their encounters. When the wife of one of her targets is butchered in her hotel room, the police investigators, suspecting the woman's husband of this and other sadistic crimes, are convinced that Claire will be able to elicit his confession. The poet Baudelaire, who believed that the unique and supreme pleasure of sex lies in the possibility of doing evil, is Claire's way into her undercover role. Her target, literature professor Patrick Fogler, is a Baudelaire devotee. Claire is carrying a lot of personal baggage, and, as she gets into her role, she vacillates, in her relationship with Patrick, between Baudelaire's dichotomized view of women: V�nus Blanche (the idolized one) and V�nus Noire (the dark lady of fantasy). In the process, she redefines the concept of an unreliable narrator when it becomes clear that she can't even trust herself. Whether what Claire thinks and says are real or not ceases to matter to the reader, desperate to get to the conclusion, which is at once expected and unexpected. This rich, nuanced, highly literary take on the Gone Girl theme adds dimension and complexity to a trend that was in danger of wearing out its welcome.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)