The Death and Birth of Iliana Marek

A young man with a terrible past finds his unlikely protector: the oddly-altered enforcer of a backwater Florida town. Edgar Award winner David Liss’s latest novel reads like Hiaasen meets Crichton—a razor-sharp allegory pulled straight from today’s headlines. Who is Iliana Marek? Is she the bully who, alongside her foster father police chief Bryce Hillard, controls and terrorizes Tylor, Florida? Or is she the reborn guardian angel of Dan Gibson, a social pariah responsible for the suicide of Faye Kristic, a death which he cannot remember ten years later. Dan’s once-promising future is in tatters. He lives in an apartment on his estranged parents’ property, works at a convenience store with a terrible boss, and is addicted to prescription drugs. But ten years after Faye’s death, Iliana suddenly takes Dan’s side, and a lot of bad people start dying fast. As Dan becomes entangled in the ensuing chaos, he needs to finally discover what part he played in the death of Faye Kristic, and why the changes to Iliana make her no longer entirely human. “In his new novel, David Liss not only plays enchantingly with the best of the crime-noir conventions, but he delves smartly into the enduring theme of serious literature—the universal quest for self, for identity. And he does so with the utmost immediacy, by raising our century’s mysteries of sentience, as humans and technology embrace. The Death and Birth of Iliana Marek is both narratively compelling and richly thought-provoking.”—Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain