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Lisa Unger's new thriller Die for You is a duel between two storytellers.
Protagonist Isabel Connelly is a bestselling novelist who prides herself on her powers of observation. At home she is Mrs. Raine, living in an elegant Manhattan apartment with her husband, Marcus Raine, a Czech immigrant who has worked his way up to partner in a successful software design firm.
It's a marriage that reads like a romance novel: The beautiful young couple met when he came to one of her book signings and swept her off her feet. Five years later, despite a miscarriage and a few other rough patches, they're still making love in the mornings and cooing over cappuccino before they head off to work.
Until the morning Marcus heads off to work and never comes home. Isabel frets through the night, then goes to his office the next morning to find no Marcus, only his extremely nervous partner. When a bunch of FBI agents burst in and start dismantling the place, Isabel really gets scared. Then she realizes they're not FBI agents - just before one of them knocks her out with a gun.
When Isabel awakes in the emergency room with an ugly gash in her head and her worried family gathered around her, one thing is clear: Marcus Raine is not who he seemed to be. His whole relationship with Isabel has been one long, carefully constructed story - and she's fallen for it.
Isabel is heartbroken, stunned, puzzled but, perhaps more than anything else, she's angry. Marcus has left her with no explanation, the police investigation is revealing worse things by the minute, and a lot of money is missing, not all of it Isabel's. But what has her really steamed as a writer is that she's been fooled - that Marcus' spin on reality has trumped hers for five years.
So, rather than go home to nurse that head wound and her dignity, she gives the cops the slip and goes after Marcus herself. It's a chase that races through Manhattan and then across the Atlantic to the Czech Republic and the dismal orphanage where Marcus was raised and to medieval, mysterious Prague, where, thanks to a dying man's whisper, Isabel thinks she can...