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The Truth Hurts

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Overview

With The Whole Truth and Ring of Truth, award-winning author Nancy Pickard introduced the intrepid Marie Lightfoot, a gutsy and charismatic true-crime writer, and kicked oV a sensational new series that sealed her reputation as one of today's top practitioners of "chilling, fast-paced, and original" thrillers (Detroit Free Press). Now Marie Lightfoot faces an unusually challenging case because this time it's personal -- painfully so, as it concerns the central mystery of her life: her parents' disappearance. My dear Marie, Do you give any thought to life after death They say that when dead people hover around the living, it is because they are stuck at the place where they died. They can't move on. I hope for your sake that doesn't happen to you, Marie, because I don't think you'll want to linger in the place where I will kill you.... When the first E-mail arrives it seems like a joke: A man writes that he loves Marie's work and wants her to collaborate with him by becoming his victim and writing a book about her own murder right up to the moment of her death.

Editorial Reviews

In Edgar nominee Pickard's third gripping Marie Lightfoot mystery (The Whole Truth; Ring of Truth), the Florida-based true crime writer is working on a book about her parents, civil rights activists in Alabama who disappeared in 1963 when Lightfoot was a toddler. She's suddenly threatened by a mysterious fan, who signs his emails Paulie Barnes and demands that she collaborate with him on a book about her own murder, or he'll start killing her friends, including her lover, Franklin DeWeese. As the police work feverishly to find the elusive Barnes, he sends Lightfoot to the town where her parents were part of a modern-day "underground railroad" network, and to meetings with their former associates. As in her sensational earlier entries, the chapters alternate between Lightfoot's third-person manuscript in which she reconstructs her parents' last days and a first-person narrative of her harrowing personal experiences. This makes for slightly disjointed reading, although it effectively shows how the present is tied to the past. Pickard excels in recreating the dangerous atmosphere of the South in the early '60s, when the white establishment used threats and murder to prevent the enforcement of civil rights laws. A solution that's obvious to the reader long before Lightfoot discovers it and some repetition undercut the suspense a bit, but Pickard succeeds with the daring Marie Lightfoot, attractive secondary characters, vivid Florida setting, a keen sense of history and a singular plot device. Agent, Meredith Bernstein. (July 9) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Nancy Pickard

Nancy Pickard, the acclaimed creator of the Jenny Cain series, is a two-time Edgar Award nominee and winner of the Agatha, Macavity, Anthony, and American Mystery awards. A great fan of Virginia Rich's books, Nancy Pickard is the co-author, with Mrs. Rich, of The 27-Ingredient Chili con Carne Murders and author of The Blue Corn Murders. The late Virginia Rich was the author of three previous Eugenia Potter mysteries and, with Nancy Pickard, of The 27-Ingredient Chili con Carne Murders. Like her heroine, Mrs. Rich lived on a cattle ranch in Arizona and also had a cottage off the coast of Maine.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Simon & Schuster

Filesize

700.18 KB

Number of Pages

400

eBook ISBN

9780743423236

Awards

  • Edgar Awards (Edgar Allan Poe Awards)

Excerpt from: The Truth Hurts by Nancy Pickard

Marie

The nice thing about my kind of fame is that I can still find a grocery store where I can go in my shorts, a sloppy T-shirt, with ratty old plastic thongs on my feet and no makeup on my face, and no one will recognize me. There are still plenty of places in the world -- if I seek them out -- where nobody's going to brake their carts and squeal in the produce aisle, "Oh, my God, you're Marie Lightfoot! Can I have your autograph?"

That has never happened in this store. Not yet at least. If it ever does, maybe I'll shop by phone. But for now, I'm blissfully anonymous, at least until the Miami Book Fair starts in three weeks. Why did I ever agree to appear there while I'm still in the middle of a book? I'll have to drop everything for a day and don my "author" persona like a witch puts on her "glamour." I'll flick my magic wand and twirl three times and transform myself into a public figure again. Then there will be television interviews and pictures in the newspapers; then there will be crowds and autographs and stacks of my own books to sell, and I'll feel like the grinning bull's-eye in the middle of a promotional target. After that, maybe even a few shoppers in here will recognize me the next time I come in, but probably not. I hope not.

Fame is, as they say, definitely a mixed blessing.

Today I'm just a working writer, standing ninth in line at the Publix supermarket in West Bahia Beach, and feeling happily inconspicuous. This chain has huge stores, scattered all over south Florida. This one is my favorite because it is way out of my neighborhood, making it even less likely that anybody I know, or anybody who might know me, will spot me.

This being south Florida in early April, it's even more crowded in Publix than usual, because not all of the spring breakers have taken their hangovers home yet. Some of them -- the girls in bikini tops and cutoff jean bottoms, the boys in baggy swim trunks and shirts they've thrown on just to come indoors -- are in line with me, mixed in with the retirees in their tidy shorts outfits and their muumuus. The kids are buying bread, cold cuts, and bottled water; their elders are here for their frozen dinners. Me, I'm here to stock up on fresh fruit, because our long-running drought has dried up my little backyard crop of avocados, oranges, grapefruit, and limes this year.

Sometimes I wonder if maybe I'm the biggest fruit in the bunch.

Here I am, again, alone in a crowd, like some character out of one of those old private eye novels. Hell, even Travis McGee -- from those great John D. MacDonald detective novels -- had his best bud, Meyer. Who have I got next to me, really? And I'm a woman, for God's sake! Aren't we supposed to be the relationship sex? Aren't we supposed to be talking on the phone every day to our girlfriends?