Familiar character, original story

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.