I could not finish this one. I started it twice but still couldn't finish it.

I didn't enjoy any of the characters and honestly I don't really care to know what Pete's secret is.

In this new series by Susan Isaacs we meet Corie Geller who gave up her exciting job on the FBI Counter Terrorism team to be a Long Island housewife. Not quite a conventional housewife but close enough. A couple of years in, the suburban routine is getting old.

One of Corie's social outlets is a luncheon group of people who are self-employed. Corie is a book finder for a few publishing houses and so she qualifies. It's not the most scintillating group of people but it's ok. After a while, Pete, who does packaging design, starts to irritate Corie by being a bit too picky about some things and lax about others. She starts to watch him and to stalk him a bit, trying to figure out why it is that this nebbish strikes her as wrong, wrong, wrong.

I haven't read much Susan Isaacs but she's published lots so people must like her. I have always thought that first-person mysteries are hard to write and I'm not convinced that this book really works. The first-person POV necessarily means that we see the other characters only through Corie's interpretation of them. Despite the author's efforts to develop these characters, they remain quite flat.

It's a good airplane read. ( )

I heard Susan Isaacs speak in St. Petersburg shortly after the 2019 publication of “Takes One to Know One,” and I remember her saying that she was nearly finished writing it before she realized her main character was all wrong. After she found the right character, she rewrote her novel with ease, she said. The result is another entertaining gem of a crime novel.

Yet now I wonder why Isaacs had trouble discovering her main character when Corie is so much like many of the author's other central characters. She too, just as Isaacs herself was before writing “Compromising Positions,” her first novel, is a bored housewife looking for a little adventure. She had been an FBI agent before she married a prominent (and wealthy) judge with a teenage daughter. She still does occasional work for the FBI, but mostly she works as a scout for literary agencies, trying to identify recent Arabic fiction that might be worth translating into English. The protagonist in “Past Perfect” formerly worked for the CIA, so again Corie is not exactly an original. And like other Isaacs main characters, she is spunky, witty and Jewish.

Corie meets regularly for lunch with a small group of people who operate solo businesses from their homes, but one of them, a man named Pete Delaney, seems a little too much like her. That is, she is hiding the fact that she formerly worked for the FBI, but what is Pete hiding? Was he formerly in law enforcement, or is he hiding something more sinister?

It is the latter, of course, and if the main character doesn't seem that original, the plot certainly is. Isaacs confidently builds up the tension as Corie tries to probe Pete's secrets, often aided by her father, a retired cop. Things really get interesting when Pete himself begins to notice that Corie seems a little too much like him. It really does take one to know one. ( )

I did like this book but, at the beginning it was incredibly slow and uninteresting (at least to me). I think that some people will probably enjoy it from the beginning to the end but I wasn’t one of those people. I don’t think that I have the best judgement in mysteries or thrillers because I think that this book was barely the second mystery/thriller that I have ever read the first one is still one of my favorite books of all time! Yet, this one really disappointed me but it was still an average book to me. I think that I was incredibly disappointed because I really liked the cover but the story wasn’t as good as I was expecting it to be. I really wished that it was better but I would still like to read and review the next books that Susan Isaacs writes. ( )

I was excited by the premise of Susan Isaacs Takes One To Know One and I’d really been looking forward to it reaching the top of my pile.

“Just a few years ago, Corie Geller was busting terrorists as an agent for the FBI. But at thirty-five, she traded in her badge for the stability of marriage and motherhood. Now Corie is married to the brilliant and remarkably handsome Judge Josh Geller and is the adoptive mother of his lovely 14-year-old daughter. Between cooking meals and playing chauffeur, Corie scouts Arabic fiction for a few literary agencies and, on Wednesdays, has lunch with her fellow Shorehaven freelancers at a so-so French restaurant. Life is, as they say, fine.
But at her weekly lunches, Corie senses that something's off. Pete Delaney, a milquetoast package designer, always shows up early, sits in the same spot (often with a different phone in hand), and keeps one eye on the Jeep he parks in the lot across the street. Corie intuitively feels that Pete is hiding something--and as someone who is accustomed to keeping her FBI past from her new neighbors, she should know. But does Pete really have a shady alternate life, or is Corie just imagining things, desperate to add some spark to her humdrum suburban existence? She decides that the only way to find out is to dust off her FBI toolkit and take a deep dive into Pete Delaney's affairs.”

So when I was considering giving up on it, just a little more than a quarter of the way through, I opted instead to put it aside for twenty four hours, and then try again. Honestly I picked it back up reluctantly and I have to admit the next quarter or so was still a slog, then at about the halfway point, the pace picked up and I suddenly couldn’t put it down.

I’m not exactly sure why I found the first half of Takes One To Know One so laborious. Told through Corie Geller’s first person perspective, the narrative felt, at times, closer to a stream of consciousness, bogged down in the details of Corie’s life. To be fair I think the poor formatting of the e-arc may have contributed to that impression, as there is no spacing between paragraphs, or even chapters, resulting in an uncomfortable run-on effect. That I didn’t really warm to Corie’s angst regarding the changes her marriage had wrought, probably didn’t help either.

For me the story finally got interesting when Corie began seriously investigating Pete Delaney and the narrative became more interactive (if that makes sense). As Corie considers and discards potential criminal scenarios that Pete Delaney could be involved in, she calls on ex colleagues for information, uses her best friend, Wynne, as a sounding board, and involves her dad, a retired police detective, in her investigation. It all eventually leads to a tense confrontation that I found unexpectedly thrilling.

I’m not sure that I can say the last half of the book was enough to redeem Takes One To Know One for me, but it’s entirely possible that you may not find the first half as problematic as I did, it may be worth a try if the premise appeals. ( )