TRUTHERS

A white, teenage girl is drawn into the shadowy world of 9/11 conspiracy theorists when her PTSD–afflicted veteran father gives her a cryptic set of clues.

Katie Wallace comes home one day to discover that her single father has been taken to the hospital after attacking a co-worker. After being questioned by police, she is allowed to see her heavily sedated father, who is also being held by authorities for threats he made against the government. He reveals shocking news: that she is not his biological daughter and that she was given to him by a woman who died, along with many others, under suspicious circumstances on 9/11 in Cleveland. Armed with this spotty information, she begins to investigate her father’s outrageous claims, assisted by new, white college friend Max Thompson. Max serves as a voice of reason while Katie finds herself almost believing her father after she is threatened and kidnapped and undergoes a past-life regression. Will Katie ever know if her father’s story is “invented? True? A mixture too muddled to separate?” That statement is also an apt summary of this overplotted novel. Billed as a thriller, it reads instead like a slow-paced, densely written treatise on 9/11 conspiracy theories and rebuttals, voiced by cardboard characters whose main function is to pontificate.

No truth here.