Line of Vision

Marty Kalish tells the story himself: he was having an affair with Rachel, her husband disappeared, and the police arrested him for murder. The novel's entire construction rests on the unreliability of Marty's self-presentation, as everything we learn about the affair, about the night in question, and about Marty as a man comes filtered through the one person who has the most reason to shape the account. Edgar Award winner David Ellis structures his debut so that wanting Marty to be innocent becomes indistinguishable from believing him.

Dick Hill narrates with the deliberate control that this kind of first-person unreliable narrator requires, keeping Marty's voice consistent and credible while allowing the space between what he says and what might be true to remain unresolved. The tension between empathy and suspicion that drives the novel's effect is preserved in Hill's delivery. At just over fourteen hours, this Edgar Award debut sustains its central ambiguity to the end.