THE DEATH AND BIRTH OF ILIANA MAREK, SFnal mysterious thrilling doings in Florida

THE DEATH AND BIRTH OF ILIANA MAREK
DAVID LISS
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A young man with a tragic past finds an unlikely protector in a strangely altered enforcer of his backwater town. In his immutable style, Edgar Award winner David Liss (The Peculiarities) incorporates the elements of a crime novel within a satirical combination of sci-fi, justice, and mercy in 21st-century America.

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 a novel as though Carl Hiaasen had collaborated with Michael Crichton, David Liss’s newest work is a powerfully astute, entertaining allegory right out of today’s headlines.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The unjustly-accused hero is irresistible to me, a story conceit I'm so sat for because Hitchcock. From The Lodger and Saboteur to North by Northwest, with stops at The Thirty-nine Steps and The Man Who Knew Too Much...my whole conscious life I've been enjoying the real hero being misjudged.

Dan's severe mistreatment at the hands...presumably...of law enforcement resulting in his concussion bad enough to rob him of his memory, well, sign me up for the cruise in first class comfort please. Iliana, a child under the care of this rotten sheriff who (presumably) led, or allowed at least, Dan's beating without knowing or caring that he was actually guilty of provoking the suicide of sweet little Faye, the dearest girl anywhere ever so of course the town went nuts! He harmed her!

Says who?

Everyone. And Iliana, plus foster dad sheriff, make sure everyone hears that version of events. Dan is beat down for ten years from all sides. You wrote these horrible, bullying things about Faye! She was a super-excellent coder and you never could be! the townsfolk spit venomously at beleaguered Dan, driving him into substance abuse and a miserable dead-end job. Why does none of this ring even a distant bell? Because you're guilty! shout the peasants, armed with the twenty-first century's pichforks and torches, chasing Dan into the town's windmill-equivalent, the local gas station/convenience store, there to suffer a miserable work life getting abused.

But Faye was working on something big, something that also cost the billionaire who hired her for the job his life (boo hoo). And that has some outsiders wondering why the entire fatal event was so tightly controlled, so free of loose ends, so improbably speedily resolved. Enough chatter about it keeps reaching Dan over the years..so heavily implicated (maybe too heavily, absent concrete proof) tat he *must* be included in the gossip, he decides to do what an outside crime reporter texts him to do: show up at the suicide site, a tower, for a meeting. It's maybe reckless, but life can't get worse than being reviled, right?

Unless you're Dan. Arriving at the tower to meet the reporter, he finds Iliana already there.

Burying bodies. And after a truly bizarre moment of unforgettable SFnal deus ex machina, acting weirdly...nice...to him. Unsettlingly, Iliana has now decided she will protect Dan from detractors defaming him...just as she did, up until now. This is all exceedingly weird, what happens and how and why are very very unexpected. It's also very welcome indeed. Having someone convert from detractor to defender...even though murderous in her execution (!) of the role...is a kindness Dan had stopped expecting anyone to show him.

What follows is an increasingly daffy and disorienting peeling of the onion's layers. No one is who they present themselves as. Nothing is uncomplicated by lies and the secrecy the entire town and attendant characters practice. It isn't just impossible to figure out who's lying, it's impossible to determine why some withhold truths and some just outright lie about the same thing.

There's a real, solid reason; you will learn it; it is not, shall we say, edifying. Dan carries trauma and guilt unjustly heaped on him. He was not, it turns out, guiltless. He never really dealt with the real guilt nor does he here, but there's an excellent reason why in the decade of cruelty he's suffered. I'd've liked to see him grow as a character but the scope of the story told here would not allow i. Nor does that scope allow for Iliana's alteration to be explicated as I so very badly wished it would be. Again, I get why, but here I sit with my teeth in my mouth....

Not a whodunit like the Benjamin Weaver stories Author Liss regaled us with, so don't expectfair-play clue laying. It's really more a mysterious, psychologically oriented, vibe-of-thrillers gone by, story. And it's good fun indeed. My quibbles are just that: quibbles. Go forth, procure, and enjoy.