THE TRUTH HURTS

South Florida true-crime writer Marie Lightfoot (Ring of Truth, 2001, etc.) has never thought of herself as a racist, and neither has state attorney Franklin DeWeese, her black fiancé. But that’s exactly what she’s accused of in a tabloid headline based on a 40-year-old scandal: her parents’ betrayal of the Hostel, a group of Dixie liberals whose dangerous civil-rights work ended June 12, 1963, the night Michael and Lyda Folletino vanished hours after President Kennedy gave an inflammatory speech on behalf of integration and the Hostel was broken and discredited. And the follow-up is even more shattering. An e-mail correspondent calling himself Paulie Barnes tells Marie that he divulged the information the story was based on and announces his plan to kill Marie, threatening to hurt everyone close to her—her assistant Deborah Dancer, her cousin Nathan Montgomery, and Franklin and his children—if she doesn’t collaborate with Barnes on her most personal book yet: the story of her own murder. Dropping hints in the form of references to John D. MacDonald’s classic The Executioners (twice filmed as Cape Fear), Barnes succeeds in manipulating and terrorizing Marie, but not in suppressing her investigator’s instincts, and when she returns at his command to her parents’ former home in Sebastion, Alabama, she shifts gears from victim to detective to track down what really smashed the Hostel.

Though she hooks readers with her extraordinary premise, Pickard never quite lands them; the energy flags in the he-said-she-said environs of Sebastion, and it hardly matters which of the interchangeable suspects is masquerading as Paulie Barnes.