Joseph Knox is the author of the Aidan Waits trilogy, as well as the terrific thriller TRUE CRIME STORY. He is back with a new stand-alone title, IMPOSTER SYNDROME, a super-charged novel that propels readers through a treacherous situation that spins out of control before your very eyes.

It opens with an ideal quote from Kurt Vonnegut: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Mark Twain once made reference to the necessity for a great memory if you are going to put on a front about who you claim to be when it comes to your public persona. The lead character in IMPOSTER SYNDROME will find this out the hard way.

"...a super-charged novel that propels readers through a treacherous situation that spins out of control before your very eyes."

The man known as Lynch considers himself to be a con man and is currently on the run from a bad situation he left behind in Paris that caused him to flee to London with only the clothes on his back and no money in his pocket. While riding random tube lines in the London Underground, Lynch finds himself at Heathrow Airport, where he needs to help an elderly passenger with her luggage to gain access to the terminal. The next step will be the difficult one --- finding someone he can work on to provide him shelter and financial assistance so that he can hunker down and figure out his next move.

This will come sooner than Lynch expects and from an unlikely source. A crazed young woman who is sporting one heck of a shiner accosts him and keeps calling him Heydon. Once the two settle down to chat in the airport lounge, he learns that Heydon is Bobbie's older brother, who disappeared without a trace five years earlier. While some believe there is evidence that Heydon died by suicide, Bobbie does not believe it. She also tells Lynch that he could be his doppelgänger.

Coming from a wealthy and badly disjointed family with the surname Pierce, Bobbie was about to board a plane for Los Angeles, where her mother insists she check into yet another rehab facility. Bobbie still plans to do that, but not before she hatches a scheme to throw the Pierce clan into a whirling dervish while possibly also discovering the truth behind what happened to Heydon. She begins by giving Lynch what she refers to as a prison facial tattoo, a small teardrop under one eye --- the only feature of Heydon’s he did not possess. Then, like something out of Six Degrees of Separation, Bobbie quickly schools Lynch on all things Heydon so he can fool the Pierces and enter their house to rob them of riches that she wants back.

Lynch has access to the Pierce estate thanks to the security codes that Bobbie gave him, but the place is not empty as she had promised him. Not only is a member of the family’s security company present, Bobbie’s mother and sister are not far behind. Even with the resemblance, they see right through Lynch and know he is not the long-lost Heydon. They also are not surprised at the heist Bobbie had planned. However, they are not willing to let Lynch go that easily. They make him an offer that will provide him with the finances he needs to start over somewhere. All he has to do is pretend to be Heydon. This will involve retracing the last-known moments of his life that involved interaction with members of the London criminal underground who may have been responsible for his alleged murder.

Nothing and no one are as they seem in IMPOSTER SYNDROME, and Lynch is in far deeper peril than he ever could have imagined. The book reminds me somewhat of Tana French’s THE LIKENESS, which is about a detective who resembled a murdered college student and took on her identity to continue living with the housemates who may have killed her. The big difference is that the character in THE LIKENESS had the entire police squad behind her, ready to step in at a moment’s notice. Here, Lynch is on his own and operating without a net in a show that can quickly turn into a tragedy. What we have here is a very unnerving read!