Title: Fake Like Me
Author: Barbara Bourland
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
Year Published: 2019

Fake Like Me is a thriller by Barbara Bourland. The story is written in first person point-of-view through a no-name narrator who starts out as an art student and moves her way upward.

While in art school, the narrator becomes obsessed with a particular art student named Carey Logan. After graduating, Carey and her artist friends soon create attention grabbing visual art. They work as a team becoming very famous and banking. The narrator puts Carey on a pedestal and hopes to one day have talent and fame like Carey.

Things are not as they seem and suddenly Carey decides she doesn’t want to do art anymore. Instead, she wants to be an actor. The narrator found that odd and wondered what made Carey change her mind. Then, Carey drowns in a lake and the narrator is even more curious as to the cause.

The narrator loses her apartment in a fire and decides to move into a cabin in a village exclusive to exceptionally talented artists, and where Carey lived. Carey’s friends were all still there and narrator hoped to learn the cause of Carey’s death through them, but everyone is hush-hush, including the narrator’s girlfriend, Max, who lives in the neighborhood but in a gorgeous home.

While getting around the village, the narrator gets to know Tyler (Carey’s boyfriend) and falls in love with him. She also hoped that he’d be the one to tell her about Carey’s death, but he refused to talk about anything having to do with Carey. In fact, no one wanted to talk about Carey, not even Max.

With the narrator’s pushing, everything is eventually revealed and with this revelation, the narrator becomes a stronger person.

This story was one crazy ride and I loved every bit of it. I found it strange that the narrator didn’t have a first or last name. The story was written so well that I didn’t even know she didn’t have a name until I finished the story and went back to find where I had missed her name, only to find that it was never mentioned. Good trickery there.

I enjoyed the buildup, the tension, the confusion, the curiosity, the way the characters tried to hide the truth (they were good at it), and the determination the narrator had at finding the truth. It was one great story that had me reading until 5am in the morning. That’s right, it was one those books where I kept saying, “Just one more chapter then I’ll go to bed.” This book is definitely up there with the thrillers, mysteries, and suspense.

This was a free Amazon book I chose to read and review for Vine.