The Truth Hurts

It takes about five hours to read this book. The reason I know this, and the reason why I can barely keep my eyes open on the morning that I write this, is because I read it all in one sitting last night. Although I’ve long been a fan of the likes of Sara Paretsky and Karen Kijewski, The Truth Hurts is only the second book of Nancy Pickard’s I’ve read. Now, I’m off to the library to devour more.

In this mystery, true-crime writer Marie Lightfoot is forced to revisit her past when she starts getting e-mails from someone who directs her to write, chapter by chapter as the plot unfolds, the story of her own murder. The killer terrorizes her and her helpless friends—including her chief prosecutor boyfriend and his young children—and slowly begins to close in on her. Her true mission, it turns out, is to return to the Alabama town where she was born, where she learns that what she grew up believing—that her parents sheltered blacks during the 1960s only to turn in their fellow civil-rights advocates­ is not the truth at all.

The resolution of the book is a bit too complex, but it’s so gripping throughout that I can forgive it that. Add The Truth Hurts to your summer reading list—but try to make it last longer than I did.