In The Company Of Liars

In The Company Of Liars is the David Ellis novel where he experiments with reverse chronology, structurally. Allison Pagone is a Chicago widow on trial for a murder she did not commit. The book opens with the verdict and works backward, in twenty-four chapters across multiple months, toward the original event the trial is supposedly about.

What Ellis does with the structure is the smart thing. The reverse chronology is not gimmick. The book is actually about how a person can become the kind of defendant whose conviction looks inevitable when seen from the wrong end of time. Each chapter changes the shape of the previous one.

The closing (or, properly, opening) chapter lands with real force.

Four stars. A formal exercise that earns its choices. Recommended to readers of structurally ambitious crime fiction. Read after Eye of the Beholder for the cleaner introduction to Ellis's voice.