Imposter Syndrome

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.