Imposter Syndrome

October 1, 2024

In this latest from Knox (True Crime Story), a man named Lynch flees Paris with no money, dressed in shabby hand-me-down clothes. As the story progresses, readers get hints: blood in an apartment, an argument with a former partner and lover. Did Lynch kill her? All his life, Lynch has been a con man, running scams on the unsuspecting, inhabiting false faces. At the London train terminal, he's approached by a young woman, Bobbie, who mistook him at first for her missing-presumed-dead brother, Heydon. She asks Lynch to have a drink with her, dopes him, and tattoos an upside-down, fractured heart beneath one of his eyes. She then hires him to reclaim something incriminating from a blackmailer. When Lynch meets Bobbie's mother, father, and sister, they all know he's a phony. They fight over whether to keep him around, then people start to die, and Lynch is a suspect. It soon dawns that it's not at all clear whether Heydon is dead or alive. VERDICT Readers may find this an unnecessarily complicated puzzle mystery with little real suspense and few memorable characters. The ending will be unanticipated, though perhaps too tricky to fall for.--David Keymer

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Starred review from November 1, 2024
There's a ghost haunting nearly every page of Knox's (True Crime Story, 2021) impressive novel--Raymond Chandler. The opening pages of The Big Sleep have Chandler's private eye, Philip Marlowe, heading off for what he hopes is a profitable meeting with an old rich guy. It is, but not without girl trouble. In Knox's thriller, we meet Lynch, the one-name narrator, who's not a private eye but a con man hiding from his avengers in London. But he does have girl trouble. Her name's Bobbie, and during an intimate moment she inks a tattoo on his face. When he objects, she aims him toward her rich family, who will likely pay to have it removed. Like Marlowe, off he goes. The meeting is dodgy, made more so by Lynch's spooky resemblance to a son who disappeared five years ago and whom Lynch sets out to find, playing detective. Things get confusing for a spell, but soon clarity returns in a hard-boiled feast. And as with Chandler, the treat is not the action, though there's plenty of that. It's the gritty writing. Where else can you get lines like, ""The bullet turns his head inside out""?

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October 7, 2024
Knox (True Crime Story) delivers a tense if overstuffed thriller about a con man’s entanglement with a wealthy family. When swindler Lynch arrives at Heathrow Airport after fleeing from Paris, he’s nearly knocked over by heiress Bobbie Pierce, who mistakes him for her missing brother, Heydon. Stunned by the resemblance, Bobbie sends Lynch to her mother, a former starlet, who hires Lynch to find Heydon by impersonating him. First, Lynch meets with a gangster to whom Heydon owed millions of dollars and hands over the money (provided by the Pierces) in return for a locked briefcase Heydon provided as collateral. Then Lynch becomes a target for thugs seeking the case’s mysterious contents. Meanwhile, Lynch learns that one of Heydon’s siblings drowned several years earlier, possibly at Heydon’s hands, and he witnesses a murder. As Lynch scrambles to figure out what, exactly, the Pierces want from him, readers are likely to feel similarly confused—Knox continues heaping new characters and subplots onto the narrative until it threatens to collapse. Lynch is a memorable protagonist—one part Tom Ripley, two parts Frank Abignale Jr.—but he’s let down by the kitchen-sink plotting. This is a mixed bag. Agent: Daniel Lazar, Writers House.