Author Dan Mallory admits he lied about having cancer and his relatives all dying

Books.
(Image credit: Damien Mayer/AFP/Getty Images)

Suspense novelist Dan Mallory acknowledged on Thursday that he doesn't just save the fiction for his books.

Mallory's debut novel, The Woman in the Window, was released in 2018, under the pseudonym A.J. Finn. The Woman in the Window instantly became a New York Times bestseller, and will soon be a movie, starring Amy Adams. This week, The New Yorker published an exquisite investigation into Mallory, interviewing colleagues in London and New York who said he told them he had cancer, that his mother died of cancer, and his brother died by suicide. Mallory was able to skate by while working at top publishing houses, they said, and lied about everything from job offers to education.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.