Ill Will

<b>NATIONAL BESTSELLER &#149; Two sensational unsolved crimes&#151;one in the past another in the present&#151;are linked by one man&#146;s memory and self-deception in this chilling novel of literary suspense from National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon.</b><br><br><b>Includes an exclusive conversation between Dan Chaon and Lynda Barry</b><br><br><b>NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY</b><br> <b><i>The Wall Street Journal</i> &#149; NPR &#149;&#160;</b><i><b>The New York Times</b></i><b>&#160;&#149; <i>Los Angeles Times</i> &#149; <i>The Washington Post</i> &#149; <i>Kirkus Reviews</i> &#149; <i>Publishers Weekly</i></b><br><br> &#147;We are always telling a story <i>to</i> ourselves about ourselves.&#148; This is one of the little mantras Dustin Tillman likes to share with his patients and it&#146;s meant to be reassuring. But what if that story is a lie?<br><br> A psychologist in suburban Cleveland Dustin is drifting through his forties when he hears the news: His adopted brother Rusty is being released from prison. Thirty years ago Rusty received a life sentence for the massacre of Dustin&#146;s parents aunt and uncle. The trial came to epitomize the 1980s hysteria over Satanic cults; despite the lack of physical evidence the jury believed the outlandish accusations Dustin and his cousin made against Rusty. Now after DNA analysis has&#160;overturned the conviction Dustin braces for a reckoning.<br><br>Meanwhile one of Dustin&#146;s patients has been plying him with stories of the drowning deaths of a string of drunk college boys. At first Dustin dismisses his patient's suggestions that a serial killer is at work as paranoid thinking but as the two embark on an amateur investigation Dustin starts to believe that there&#146;s more to the deaths than coincidence. Soon he becomes obsessed crossing all professional boundaries&#151;and putting his own family in harm&#146;s way.<br><br> From one of today&#146;s most renowned practitioners of literary suspense <i>Ill Will </i>is an intimate thriller about the failures of memory and the perils of self-deception. In Dan Chaon&#146;s nimble chilling prose the past looms over the present turning each into a haunted place.<br><br><b>&#147;In his haunting strikingly original new novel [Dan] Chaon takes formidable risks dismantling his timeline like a film editor.&#148;&#151;<i>The New York Times Book Review</i></b><br><br><b> &#147;The scariest novel of the year . . . ingenious . . . Chaon&#146;s novel walks along a garrote stretched taut between Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock.&#148;&#151;<i>The Washington Post</i></b>