David Ellis Creates Suspense with Unreliable Narrator in 'The Best LIes'

The Best Lies is New York Times #1 bestselling author, David Ellis’, 11th published crime novel. The book follows Leo Balanoff, an attorney and diagnosed pathological liar, who’s framed for the murder of a local gangster. In exchange for life in prison, Leo chooses to go undercover for the FBI to help take down the rest of the crime ring. According to Ellis, “As the book begins, Leo finds himself charged with murder of a very, very bad person, and ends up to get out of that criminal charge being roped into an undercover FBI investigation, and so Chris Roberti is the FBI agent.” Written in multiple points of views, the story is told in first person by Leo, and told in third person by Leo’s ex-girlfriend, Andi, and the FBI agent. Ellis remarked, “Chris was obviously important enough in the book that I needed his point of view. He was going to see many things that Leo and Andi were not going to see, so I needed that point of view, but from a character development standpoint he was probably slightly less important. The book is really about Leo and Andi… At one point, I had a fourth point of view and then I changed it.”

Regarding the complexity of the novel, Ellis includes the plot twists in his stories as they come to him during the writing process. “I knew what the final twist was. That was one of the animating plot points of the book was the final twist, and that’s not uncommon for writers to think of what the big surprise is going to be. I knew that I wanted twists throughout the book, but I wasn’t entirely sure what they were going to be. I will tell you that I wish I could do that… if I could outline the entire book before I started, I could write a lot faster. I write with some ideas of what I want to do and then usually as I get into it, the plot twist comes to me, and sometimes they’ll come to me and it will require me to go back and change some of the stuff I’ve already done, and so that’s very inefficient… but that’s how I seem to do it.” While the unexpected twists are intriguing and thrilling, Ellis said that surprising his readers at the end is not his main goal in writing. “Every one of these kinds of books is going to surprise you at the end if they’re doing their job, but what I really want to do is I want to make the ride just as fun…”