Years ago, an author wrote a book called The Decoy…it was published but nothing really happened. Later, after that author published a best-seller (The Girl Before), they re-wrote The Decoy and thanks to Random House-Ballantine and NetGalley, I received a copy in exchange for my honest review.

So, we meet Claire, a young British woman living in the U.S. without a green card, which limits her employability. She is an actress, and when she gets the opportunity for a fairly well-paying job that involves role-playing, she takes it. In this job, she works for a private detective on a cash basis as as a decoy, basically working to entrap men who cheat on their wives/partners.  She gets everything on tape when the man propositions her. She does this very well, until a wife who  is being cheated on is murdered, the police suspect the husband, and they basically put the screws to Claire (under threat of deportation) to help them get a confession from the man.

It sounded interesting, especially as I am a fan of psychological thrillers, and I enjoyed The Girl Before. But as this story goes along, it isn’t clear whether Claire is playing her role for the police extremely well, or maybe she is the one the police suspect of the murder and robbery of the wife, and the police are working to entrap her??

Parts of the book are presented as if it is a script, and there is a lot of literary pretension with quotes from Baudelaire dealing with his book on S&M poetry (S&M being part of the whole scene), and parts of it are fine. Maybe it is just me, but after awhile I really didn’t care what happened to Claire, who committed the murder, what happened to them, or if Claire was deported. No one was really likeable, and I just wanted it to be over with. My classic example is the way I felt when I saw the movie Raising Phoenix: I REALLY didn’t like it, but I just HAD to finish it to see what happened. I finished this book and struggled to decide how many stars, ending up with two.

J.P. Delaney is the pseudonym of Tony Strong, who wrote The Death Pit, Tell Me No Lies, and The Decoy (which was re-written and published as Believe Me) in the late 90s and early 00s. Not my thing.