Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Thriller / suspense fiction

LOOK CLOSER

David Ellis

A husband, his mistress, his wife, and her lover: in this wickedly clever novel of suspense, four lives collide, one ends up dead, and nothing is what it seems.

Simon Dobias is a brilliant but troubled law professor who never truly recovered from his parents' untimely deaths. Despite appearing to have a stable marriage, a secret whirlwind affair with an old flame throws everything into question.

Vicky Lanier truly cares for her husband, who saved her during her darkest moments. But their romance has run its course, and now Vicky's playing the waiting game. In just a few weeks, she'll finally have full access to Simon's twenty-million-dollar trust, and she can practically feel the money in her hands. But when she discovers his affair, her already precarious future hangs by a thread.

When the body of a beautiful socialite is found hanging in the mansion of a wealthy Chicago suburb, it's the culmination of an explosive situation months in the making...

But as to how it happened and why? Question everything you think you know.

David Ellis is a judge and an Edgar-award-winning author of nine novels of crime fiction, as well as five books co-authored with James Patterson. In December, 2014, Dave was sworn in as the youngest-serving Justice of the Illinois Appellate Court for the First District.
Dave currently lives outside Chicago with his wife and three children.

Available products
Book Published 2022-07-05 by Putnam's Sons
Book Published 2022-07-05 by Putnam's Sons

Comments

[S]erpentine revelations will surprise even the cleverest mystery readers. This complex tale of triple-crossings and devious revenge should win Ellis new fans.

A daring, brilliant thriller, full of characters you both love and hate and more unexpected turns than a mountain road at night without your headlights. Tremendous fun!

Look Closer marks a much-welcome return of Ellis' solo work. It comes with his trademark labyrinthine plots that spin on twist after twist and several never-saw-that-coming turns... Ellis juggles romantic triangles, betrayal after betrayal, revenge and greed for a complex plot that evolves into one solid twist after another. Each character's shady past and their unshakeable present merge into an exciting plot.

Film/tv rights were just optioned to Amazon for a limited series for writer/producer Carlton Cuse (Lost, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Locke & Key, etc)! Watch for the official press release...

Absolutely dazzling! David Ellis is a master storyteller who keeps us riveted to the pages. A whip-smart and diabolically plotted thriller, with crackling dialogue, nonstop pacing, and tour de force structure. A profoundly insightful study of greed, obsession, revenge, and justice. Riveting, compelling, and completely entertaining!

David Ellis delivers an unforgettable read with Look Closer, a dizzyingly clever thriller where nothing is as it first appears. It kept me guessing from page one--this novel is endlessly surprising and great fun.

Impressive...The tale of murder and misdirection is a solid two days of beach escape.

Suspenseful, sexy, involving, twisty and twisted. I'll tell you what Look Closer is James Patterson's Book Club selection. You won't forget this novel, and these characters - good and bad - for a long time.

Most mysteries and thrillers depend on the core assumption that the first third of the book represents known facts before the rug is pulled out from under the reader. In LOOK CLOSER (Putnam, 448 pp., $27), David Ellis's first solo novel in nearly a decade (after several co-authored with James Patterson), the fun is figuring out what parts of the story if any should be trusted. The book opens on Halloween night, as a wealthy law professor named Simon, clutching a burner phone, flees the suburban mansion where a woman has just been murdered. That this scene is not what it seems is a given, and the reader is soon transported into a dizzyingly nonlinear narrative of family secrets, unsolved killings, financial scams, prenuptial agreements, salacious text messages and petty revenge. Though Ellis juggles a great many plot strands, he doesn't drop them; the result is wildly entertaining, not tedious. It helps that just about every character in the book is the very definition of unreliable. As one of them muses, with more than a touch of menace: "That's what you do with the people you love. You trust them. You trust them until they prove you wrong. Until they betray you. And then, you react however you're wired to react".

Italian: Fanucci ; Bulgarian: Bard ; Polish: Harde ; Russian: Eksmo

Twisty, intricately plotted... Even seasoned mystery readers won't be able to predict all the knots in Simon and Vicky's tangled web of deception. A roller-coaster ride full of unexpected twists and turns.