THE WHOLE TRUTH

Pickard (The Blue Corn Murders, 1998, etc.) launches a new series introducing crime writer Marie Lightfoot, who covers spectacular murder trials and turns them into bestsellers. Here, her manuscript on accused child-slayer Ray Raintree awaits finishing touches when chaos erupts in the courtroom: Found guilty, Ray goes berserk and attacks the judge, who pulls out a .22 and shoots him. Exiting the courthouse on a stretcher, Ray overpowers his minders and escapes, setting off a manhunt along the Intercoastal waterway surrounding Florida’s Bahia Beach community. National media attention brings Marie e-mail from a retired Kansas deputy who says little Johnny Kepler, abducted 22 years ago and never found, had an imaginary playmate named Ray Raintree. Is Ray really Johnny, an abducted child grown up to be an abductor himself? Marie’s lover, black state’s attorney Franklin DeWeese, insists a killer’s a killer, no matter why, but Marie’s sympathies are engaged by both victims’ families, and waver in her assessment of the repulsive Ray/Johnny. Two more will die before the case draws to a close, with Marie’s romance on hold, and her book past deadline'though Marie’s moral dilemmas consistently present Pickard with deeper challenges than her Jenny Cain series and her continuing entries in Virginia Rich’s saga. Chapters shuttling between present and past provide some confusion, and the glimmers of Marie’s own mysterious past are sometimes trying. But the black/white love affair is handled with wit, a pair of detectives fill out the cast nicely, and Marie seems like a keeper. (Mystery Guild featured alternate selection; author tour)