Genuine Fraud is a young adult mystery thriller by E. Lockhart. It tells the story of Jule, a social chameleon with a mysterious past and a bad habit of getting into fights, and Imogen, a wealthy heiress who reacts very negatively to having anyone else's expectations pushed on her. Besides being orphans and having slightly similar appearances, the girls seem to have very little in common, and yet when the story opens, Jule has taken on Imogen's identity and is hiding out in a hotel in Mexico. The book tells the story in reverse order, going back through the last year of Jule's life and exploring how she ended up with her best friend's name, and what exactly she's running from.
This novel provides examples of:
- Action Girl: Jule is strong from swimming and, although she has no formal training, a pretty good fighter, usually with improvised weapons. She nearly killed a boy with a shoe, which was why she went on the run.
- Ambiguous Disorder: Jule is almost completely unconcerned with anyone's feelings besides her own, and despite being a very skilled manipulator, she has a habit of latching on to people who treat her with enough kindness, which blinds her to their very human flaws.
- Anachronic Order: The book starts with Noa coming upon Jule in the hotel, then goes backward to reveal how she got there, and backward to reveal how she got to the point before that, and so on, before jumping back to the present time.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: Despite her difficulty trusting people, Jule tends to latch onto anyone who she perceives as being accepting of her true nature. She only gets involved with Imogen in the first place because she's being paid to do so, but eventually grows to see Imogen as her best friend, even though Imogen isn't nearly as invested in the relationship as she is.
- Birds of a Feather: Imogen and Jule. Subverted; the reason Imogen and Jule seem to have so much in common is because Jule is deliberately doing or playing up things she knows Imogen will like.
- Noa exploits this in the opening chapter by specifically making conversation about things she knows will draw Jule in; Jule all but kicks herself for it when she realizes what's going on. And then it gets a further twist in the end when it turns out Noa was actually attempting to invoke this with Imogen because that's who she thinks Jule is.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Imogen. She love-bombs people initially, and then cold-shoulders them when she gets tired of them or they become inconvenient. Brooke claims she only respects people who don't fall apart after she suddenly dumps them. Jule thinks their relationship is different but it isn't, which drives Jule to kill her.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Jule invents one for herself, in which her parents are horribly murdered, and a woman trains her to be a secret agent from the age of 8. In reality, her mother died from an illness and her father committed suicide, leaving her to be raised by a neglectful aunt.
- Driven to Suicide: Scott, the boy who cleans Imogen's pool, after he gets deep into debt with a dog-fighting ring, and Imogen drops him cold after he begs her for money.
- Also, Jule's father, when Jule was a child.
- Foreshadowing: It's repeatedly pointed out throughout the novel that while Jule and Imogen don't look that similar, they have enough physically in common to pass for each other in a pinch. At the end, it turns out Noa mistakenly thinks that Imogen killed Jule, when really it's the other way around.
- Happily Adopted: Deconstructed. Imogen was adopted by the Sokoloffs at age two after her biological mother's death from a drug overdose; it gave her access to wealth, privilege, and a much better life than she likely would have had otherwise, but it also gave her a host of complicated feelings about being adopted that no one in her life was really able to understand.
- Hidden Depths: Jule and Forrest don't get along very well at any point, but Jule does admit that he's good in a crisis when he starts handling the phone notifications after Imogen's suicide. He's also smart enough to immediately and correctly suspect that Jule had something to do with Imogen's death despite her painstaking efforts to hide the evidence.
- I Just Want to Be Loved: At the core of Jule's character is her desire to have someone love and accept her for who she is despite her terrible actions throughout the novel.
- I Have This Friend: When drunk, Jule tells some fellow Culebra runaways about "a girl she knew" who was raped, and how Jule attacked the rapist. She insists it was someone else, but she knows a lot of details, and the woman she's talking to thinks it happened to her.
- I Surrender, Suckers: Jule uses this to great effect against Donovan in the opening chapter, when he tries to shake her down for extra money. She does it again to Noa at the end in order to make her escape.
- Insecure Love Interest: An interesting example with Jule, who repeatedly pushes Paolo away partly because she feels like she isn't good enough for him (and partly because he's unintentionally a Spanner in the Works to her cover story). While Paolo repeatedly reassures her that he likes her and thinks she's an excellent person, the reader eventually learns that Jule became obsessed with Imogen and snapped when Imogen confronted her, and Jule killed Imogen in the ensuing argument. She also took over Imogen's identity and forged a will in order to gain control of all of Imogen's money, and she killed Brooke for asking too many questions. And that's putting aside the fact that Paolo thinks Jule is Imogen. Needless to say, Jule has good reason to believe she shouldn't be with Paolo.
- Jerkass Has a Point:
- Imogen, multiple times. She is at different points very cutting and cruel to Scott and Jule, but she was totally right that dogfighting is wrong and Scott hurt an animal for money/amusement, and that Jule did basically stalk her.
- Forrest admits that Jule has a point when she tells him that a whole lot of people adapt to him because of his class, gender, race, and wealth.
- Brooke is particularly standoffish to Jule and eventually confronts her to tell her to stay away from Imogen. But from her perspective, a random person Imogen used to know showed up out of nowhere and started monopolizing Imogen's time and money within days. And unbeknownst to Brooke, by the time this confrontation happens Jule has already murdered Imogen.
- Karma Houdini: Jule gets away with murdering Imogen and Brooke, successfully evades arrest, and skips town with several million dollars under her name. Not only that, but the police think she's dead and that Imogen took her place, so they're actually looking for Imogen and not her.
- Loving a Shadow: Jule has Imogen on such a ridiculously high pedestal that Imogen isn't possibly able to live up to it, nor does she want to, and when Jule is confronted with evidence that Imogen is neither a perfect person nor her best friend, she firmly ignores it because she's unwilling to see Imogen any other way. When Imogen finally directly confronts Jule about it, Jule snaps and kills Imogen.
- Master of Disguise: Jule is self-taught, largely through a mixture of online tutorials and people-watching.
- Mistaken Identity: Jule and Imogen don't actually look that much alike if you see them together, but from a distance they can pass for each other, which Jule constantly uses to her advantage.
- There's also one in the backstory: Patti mistakes Jule for Jolie, a girl she'd tried to push on Imogen in high school. Jule rolls with it, and this is how she ends up getting into Imogen's life.
- Multiple-Choice Past: Jule's "origin story," which she privately admits is fabricated so that she doesn't have to think about what actually happened. The real truth is that her mother died of terminal illness, her father committed suicide, and her neglectful aunt took her in.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Jule after killing Imogen, and later Brooke.
- Never Suicide: Imogen supposedly jumped into the Thames with her pockets full of stones. Her boyfriend Forrest keeps insisting that maybe she could have been forced to write the suicide note and kidnapped, since her parents are rich and could pay a high ransom (he's grieving, so the
Fridge Logic of ransom for a supposedly dead girl doesn't occur to him). Eventually the police give in and send Noa to investigate. He's right; Jule murdered Imogen and forged the note. - Parental Abandonment: Imogen's biological mother lost custody of her and later died from a meth overdose, and her biological father wasn't listed in her records, leaving her to be adopted by the Sokoloffs.
- It's established early on that Jule's parents aren't in the picture, but she goes well out of her way to avoid even thinking about the reason, let alone revealing it to anyone else. Her mother passed away from a terminal illness and her father subsequently committed suicide out of grief.
- Properly Paranoid: Forrest suspects Jule of being involved with Imogen's death almost as soon as he hears about it, and the reader eventually learns that he's right.
- Brooke doesn't suspect Jule of murder, but does think that Jule is mentally unstable and needs to back away from Imogen and get some help. She's more right than she knows; by the time she brings this up, Jule has already had a similar confrontation with Imogen that led to Imogen's death.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Played with between Brooke and Jule; some of Brooke's points fall flat because she doesn't realize that Jule is lying about her background and didn't actually go to Stanford, but her point about Jule swooping in out of nowhere to take over Imogen's life is much more valid.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Forrest is convinced that there was foul play involved with Imogen's suicide. He correctly suspects Jule and eventually manages to get the police involved further, but they end up concluding that Imogen was the one who killed Jule when in reality it was the other way around.
- Spanner in the Works: Paolo unintentionally becomes one for Jule because she impulsively pretends to be Imogen when she meets him, thinking that she'll never see him again. They run into each other multiple times; one of those times is very inconvenient and he calls her Imogen in front of Forrest, forcing her to flee London.
- Sure, Let's Go with That: How Jule ended up meeting Imogen in the first place. She ran into Imogen's mother Patti, who mistook her for an old school friend of Imogen's, and decided to go along with it. Patti then offered to pay her to get close to Imogen and make sure she was all right, and Jule went along with that too.
- True Companions: Imogen and Jule. Except not.
- Unreliable Narrator: Jule, full stop. The story being told in reverse-chronological order means we learn about events before we have the context to know what really happened, and Jule constantly invokes Exact Words in her narration or simply refuses to think about certain events in her backstory for very long. Even in-universe, most of what she says to other characters is at least partially fabricated.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Patti mistakes Jule for an old friend of Imogen's and gets Jule involved in Imogen's life, which eventually gets Imogen (and then Brooke) murdered.
- Wham Line: When Noa calls Jule Imogen, revealing that this entire time the cops have thought Imogen killed Jule.
