Skin Deep by Liz Nugent (Penguin)

We all pretend to be someone we aren’t, usually to fit in at a job or survive a family dinner. Cordelia Russell just turned it into a twenty-five-year career. Living in a flat she can’t afford on the French Riviera, she has spent decades convincing everyone she is an English socialite. It’s a performance sustained by heavy drinking and the wallets of others. But the luck has run out. When her past arrives at her door, Cordelia responds with the kind of panicked violence that only comes from someone who has everything to lose and nothing to gain.

The vibe here is sun-drenched noir. One moment you are at a glittering party, and the next you are smelling the flies buzzing around a corpse that is decomposing much faster than Cordelia expected. The transition from the fake glamour of her life to the raw, visceral reality of a dead body in her living room is handled with a bluntness that I really appreciated. Liz Nugent writes with a sharp, observational distance that makes the horror feel almost casual.

"I could probably have been an actress. It is not difficult to pretend to be somebody else. Isn't that what I've been doing for most of my life?"

This book is for anyone who enjoys watching a slow-motion car crash of a life. Cordelia isn't a "strong female lead" in the boring, trope-heavy sense. She is a mess. She is aging, her beauty is fading, and her lies are catching up to her. The supporting characters feel real because they are mostly just as selfish as she is. The pacing is tight, moving between the past and the present to show exactly how a girl from a rough background becomes a fake aristocrat. It is a study of how beauty can be a currency and how quickly that currency devalues.

Read this if you want a psychological thriller that actually has something to say about identity and the rot beneath the surface of the wealthy. Skip it if you need a protagonist you can actually root for. This is a story about the consequences of being "Skin Deep."

4/5