While she is known for her thrillers and police procedurals, bestselling author J.T. Ellison also has a knack for domestic noir. Her latest book, Lie to Me, is about the disintegration of a "perfect" marriage. It's a page-turner reminiscent of Gone Girl that will enthrall Ellison's fans worldwide and hook new readers.
Lie to Me focuses on the marriage of Sutton and Ethan Montclair. Consumed by professional and personal betrayals and financial woes, the two simultaneously love and hate each other. When Sutton disappears, leaving behind a note saying not to look for her, Ethan finds himself the target of vicious gossip as friends, family, and the media speculate about what happened to his wife. As the police investigate, the lies the couple have been spinning for years quickly unravel, making for a haunting story laced with intrigue and emotion.
Ellison's debut novel, All the Pretty Girls, was published in 2007, not long after her departure from Washington, D.C., where she served as a presidential appointee working in the White House and the Department of Commerce. It was the first of seven titles in the bestselling Lt. Taylor Jackson series. But Ellison wanted to explore beyond Jackson's world of cops and killers, so the Nashville-based author worked on a series of thrillers about medical examiner Dr. Samantha Owens, as well as on the Brit in the FBI series, cowritten with Catherine Coulter.
Lie to Me is Ellison's second standalone. Her first, No One Knows, was published in 2016. While she's still committed to her series, Ellison couldn't resist taking another stab at a one-off. "Taylor's books are all wildly different, and Sam's books started to become international, and I see a path that will allow me to keep both series fresh and new," Ellison says. "But at the same time, the idea of a standalone, making a story work inside itself, without any lingering story lines, presents another kind of challenge."
Like Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, Lie to Me slowly reveals what's hidden beneath an ideal suburban facade by alternating between Sutton's and Ethan's points of view. But Ellison says that, aside from a marriage gone wrong and unreliable narrators, Lie to Me and Gone Girl are "very different."
For one thing, both of Ellison's protagonists are writers—she decided to ignore the old adage "never write about writing" and follow another piece of sage advice: "Write what you know." The author says: "I love books about writers and I think readers do, too. For me, creativity of any kind is great fodder for dynamic characters."
While Sutton and Ethan practice the same art as Ellison, she is careful to point out that they are not based on real people. "Imagine the worst behavior you've ever heard of, then amplify that by 10—and voilà, you have fun, complex, and exciting characters to write," Ellison says. "I'm especially fascinated by how horrible people can be to one another. That's generally the basis for many of my stories."
Ellison admits that Lie to Me was her most challenging project to date. "Writing law enforcement and military characters is more straightforward—the action takes care of itself," she explains. "When you have an ordinary person to whom an extraordinary event happens, the heart of the story and the structure are very different. You have to be careful not to have them do things that aren't realistic."
Lie to Me was worth the work. "I knew I had to let it all hang out, to give every bit of creative talent I had to make it fun and vicious and exciting and different," Ellison says. "When I finished, I experienced a level of creative satisfaction I'd never achieved before. It felt like magic, like I really tapped into something I've never quite been able to reach in my previous work." Readers will be moved by that magic, too.