Ellis, David. In the company of liars. New York: Berkley Books, 2005. ISBN 0-425-20429-4.

Summary: A gimmicky but very readable thriller, combining elements of a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and a spy novel. The main gimmick is that the sixty or so episodes that make up the plot are arranged in reverse chronological order. In order for a plot so arranged to have any suspense, the motives of the characters have to become clear only near the end of the book. Consequently, there is an aura of mystification about two or three of the central characters, and even so the author occasionally has to mislead his readers in some fairly significant ways.

The plot is centered around the trial of a woman who is charged, on circumstantial evidence, with killing her lover. We see the accused woman's funeral; then the discovery of her body by FBI investigators, who determine that she has committed suicide, only two days before jury deliberations were supposed to begin; then the appearance at her home of a hired killer, a Pakistani member of a shadowy terrorist organization, who presents her with the prepared texts of pre-suicidal messages that she is to leave on the answering machines of her lawyer and one of the FBI investigators, points his revolver at her, ... (tasteful break in the text here) ..., and stages the scene to look convincingly like a suicide; then we see him receiving his instructions; and so on, back and back and back, until, eleven years earlier, we see a thirteen-year-old boy in Pakistan being hired as a secret agent for a foreign government ...

It's vividly written, if melodramatic and stagy at times.