This month’s book club read was Don’t Believe It by Charlie Donlea. If you haven’t read anything by him, I would recommend adding one of his books to your TBR list.
This suspense novel centers around a woman, Grace Seabold, who has been imprisoned for ten years in St. Lucia for the murder of her boyfriend, Julian Crist.
Sidney Ryan is an up-and-coming film producer who in the past produced two documentaries shedding light on a person in jail who was believed to be wrongfully convicted. This puts her in the radar of every convict in the country who believes they are innocent. Grace Seabold is one of those convicts. She writes to Sidney asking for her help to dig into her story and show the world she is innocent. Sidney travels to St. Lucia, meets with Grace and heads back home to make a pitch to the suits at Events, the station for which she is working as a producer. Given the green light, Sidney starts investigating the murder and the cast of characters that will make up the documentary The Girl of Sugar Beach. With each episode, more and more people become hooked on the one episode a week documentary which has Sidney finding things out along with the viewers. As Sidney becomes increasingly entwined in the case and begins to uncover inconsistencies, she and her audience of twenty million viewers are starting to believe that Grace Seabold is innocent. But is she?
Although about three-quarters of the way through the book, I was pretty sure who might be behind the murder, I wasn’t 100% sure. With an ending I didn’t see coming, Charlie Donlea had me turning pages and reading this book in a week’s time. I will have to say I had hoped for a different ending, but it was cleverly done. This is the second book I have read by this author. The first was titled, Twenty Years Later. Charlie Donlea is a master storyteller. His books are full of plot twists, and I will definitely pick up another novel by this author.
