From Publishers Weekly
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.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Pickard's new Marie Lightfoot mystery (after The Whole Truth and Ring of Truth) has an intriguing premise. A tabloid has just published a lurid article featuring Marie, focusing on her personal life and the unsolved disappearance of her parents in 1963. Marie then receives an e-mail from Paulie Barnes, who takes credit for the article and threatens to hurt her if she does not cooperate with his demands. He wants her to collaborate with him on writing a book about her own murder. Marie wonders if he is someone she has written about who wants revenge. She begins to believe that the connection is more personal, though, as Paulie forces her to investigate the circumstances of her parents' disappearance. What is the truth behind their apparent betrayal of the underground railroad they had founded? And can she find out in time to save herself? Pickard's narrative flags a bit in the middle, but the suspense returns in plenty of time for the denouement. Fans of the series won't be disappointed. Recommended for most public libraries. Laurel Bliss, Yale Arts Lib., New Haven, CTCopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
In the third Marie Lightfoot mystery (Pickard was nominated for the Edgar for The Whole Truth [2000], the first in the series), the heroine, a famous writer of true-crime books, receives the ultimate assignment. A madman threatens Lightfoot with the deaths of her intimates unless she chronicles his campaign of terror against her, up to the moment that he murders her. This unnerving device is launched by a tabloid story that accuses Lightfoot of hiding her racist past, implicating her parents as segregationists in the fifties. The story was planted by Lightfoot's tormentor and, to clear her good name and perhaps save her life, Lightfoot must retrace her convoluted family history. Although Pickard's style is somewhat labored, with strained humor and superficial characterizations, the plot here never sets a foot wrong. The campaign of terror against Lightfoot, involving psychological torture through devices like e-mail and FedEx, is wickedly well constructed and convincing. For another fictional true-crime author, see Krich's Molly Blume, whose latest adventure, Blues in the Night, will be reviewed in the August 2002 Booklist. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Fast-paced, thrilling, original.


Book Description
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. If she doesn't cooperate, he promises, he will hurt someone close to her. Marie is merely unsettled until more threatening E-mails arrive and the young children of her lover, State Attorney Franklin DeWeese, become targets of vicious pranks. Until the police can apprehend her tormentor, Marie has no choice but to play along, following her "co-author's" instructions to write her life story and return to her birthplace, a small town in Alabama. There Marie seeks out a group of the town's most prominent citizens. Forty years ago, they worked clandestinely in the civil rights movement alongside her parents, who disappeared during the explosive summer of 1963. Trying to untangle the divided loyalties, secrets, lies, and misunderstandings that have obscured the truth about her parents, Marie races to unravel the secrets of the past and outwit a killer before she is forced to write her final page. Filled with rich characterizations, steadily escalating suspense, and a rare depth of emotion, The Truth Hurts draws readers into a mystery that spans the present day and the tense, heartbreaking early days of America's civil rights movement. In a novel as complex and captivating as her inimitable heroine, Nancy Pickard keeps readers guessing until the Wnal page is turned.


Download Description
"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 off 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. If she doesn't cooperate, he promises, he will hurt someone close to her. Marie is merely unsettled until more threatening E-mails arrive and the young children of her lover, State Attorney Franklin DeWeese, become targets of vicious pranks. Until the police can apprehend her tormentor, Marie has no choice but to play along, following her "co-author's" instructions to write her life story and return to her birthplace, a small town in Alabama. There Marie seeks out a group of the town's most prominent citizens. Forty years ago, they worked clandestinely in the civil rights movement alongside her parents, who disappeared during the explosive summer of 1963. Filled with rich characterizations, steadily escalating suspense, and a rare depth of emotion, The Truth Hurts draws readers into a mystery that spans the present day and the tense.


About the Author
Nancy Pickard, creator of the acclaimed Jenny Cain mystery series, won the Anthony Award for Say No to Murder, a Macavity Award for Marriage Is Murder, and two Agatha Awards for Best Novel, for Bum Steer and I.O.U. Her two previous Marie Lightfoot mysteries -- The Whole Truth, an Edgar Award finalist, and Ring of Truth -- were national bestsellers. A former reporter and editor, she is a past president of Sisters in Crime. She divides her time between Kansas and Florida.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1: 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? I must've missed that lesson. Where are my husband, my children, my best girlfriend? I don't see them here in my shopping cart. When I'm writing -- oh, hell, anytime -- this is what generally passes for a social life for me. Going grocery shopping. Eating alone in a restaurant, writing in a notebook while strangers around me carry on their apparently normal lives. I do have a boyfriend, Franklin. There's that to be said for me, but we've conducted most of our love life in such intense privacy, madly enjoying only each other's company, that a person could be excused for confusing it with an isolation chamber. And by God, I have friends, too. I do. Male friends, female friends. None from my childhood, except for my screenwriter cousin Nathan, whom I adore, but he lives three thousand miles away in L.A. Nathan's my only family, really. I sure don't count my Aunt Julia and Uncle Joe -- his parents who raised me -- as Mom and Dad. Ugh. No way. It's hard enough for Nathan to call them Mom and Dad, and he's their real boy. But I have other friends besides him. I do. One left over from high school. Three people I sort of keep in contact with from college. A lot of business friends and acquaintances. I'm pretty close to my longtime agent and editor. I have an assistant now, Deborah, and she's beginning to feel like a younger sister, for better or worse. Of course, except for her and my boyfriend, Franklin, and a few business friends from around here, all of my other "close" friends are an airplane ride away, but we're still friends, it still counts. It does. These people around me, though, some of them seem to have friends with them right here and now, but that's only because they're kids on spring break. Take the two boys in line in front of me, for instance. "Dude," mutters one of them to his lanky, sunburned friend. "Check it out." I check it out, too, as if I'm actually a part of their conversation: it's the cover of this week's US magazine, which features a famous female singer in a photograph that reveals a lot of the chest from which her dulcet tones emerge. "Oh, man" is his friend's considered judgment. Being a writer -- even a best-selling one -- is usually not anywhere near as public as being a movie star, at least not when I'm out in "real life," like this. Not that I don't use what fame I have, every chance I get, to help sell more books. I do. (My specialty is the section in the bookstores called True Crime, the one with all those hot titles -- Dying to Be Loved -- and gory covers.) Then I'm recognized as Marie Lightfoot, and glad of it. But times like this, I just want to pay for my juicy fruits and get back home to work. The kids in the front of the line are having trouble coming up with enough change to pay for their stuff. They're digging in their pockets and backpacks and pooling their quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies on the counter in front of the cashier. She's keeping a hand firmly on the handles of the plastic bag that holds their groceries and she looks suspicious, as if she thinks they might just grab it and run. That would be interesting: I'd get to be an eyewitness to a true crime, but hardly of the sort that I usually cover. My books are long on sensational murders and heinous killers -- not on teenagers copping Doritos and bean dip. "Just charge it, for crissake," one kid says to the other. That seems to light up the ol' beer-saturated brain cells. Now all his friend has to do is dig through his fanny pack and backpack to find a MasterCard or a Visa he can use. While I wait, I peruse the rest of the magazine and tabloid racks. Hm, what have we here? I'll be damned, Bigfoot's been sighted in Washington State again. Isn't that amazing. And my goodness, it appears that he has fathered twins this time. I'm tempted to pick up the tabloid and open it to find out who the lucky mom might be -- Janet Jackson? Hillary Clinton? Rosie O'Donnell? -- but what would the people behind me think? Oh, but will you look at that? Elvis is flying UFOs again. He must have trained out there in Nevada when he was doing all those Vegas shows. And here's a little color picture of -- Oh, my God. "Ma'am? You want to move your cart on up? Ma'am?" I barely hear the cashier. The world just stopped for me. I can hear the other shoppers only through the deafening roar in my ears. I feel sick. I have to hang on to the handle of my shopping cart. There is a little photograph of me in the upper-right-hand corner of the tabloid newspaper, The Insider. And not just me, either, but me and my boyfriend. I've been on magazine covers before, that's not the problem. He's been on the front pages of newspapers before, that's not the problem. My boyfriend and I have even been photographed together, now that we're going public about our relationship, so that's not the problem, either. Everybody knows now that Marie Lightfoot, the true crime writer, is dating Franklin DeWeese, the state attorney of Howard County, Florida. They know I'm a white woman; they know he's a black man. That's not news anymore. What's different, appalling, shocking to me about this particular cover on the newsstands is the headline, printed in a small typeface, but one that is all caps, all black, and all too easy to read: "Best-Selling Author Hides Her Racist Past." "Ma'am? You going to check your stuff through now?" the cashier asks. My hand reaches out for the top copy and places it in my shopping cart and I move numbly toward her. "Yes, I'm sorry." I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Yes, I hide it, wouldn't anybody? But it's not my past, it's my parents'. I'm not a racist; I date a black man, for God's sake. It was them, it was my mother and my father. It was them. And I haven't hidden anything from Franklin. He knows... And now it appears the rest of the world will, too. "That'll be seventeen dollars and twenty-seven cents, ma'am." No, Angie -- the young checker's name is Angie, according to her name tag, which I stare at as if somebody has just walloped me with a two-by-four -- you have no idea how much this will cost us, and neither do I. I hand her my cash, take my change and my bags with the tabloid newspaper tucked down inside one of them. "Have a nice day," she says. I was actually having a pretty nice life until five minutes ago. I was, that is, if you don't count the fallout from my "racist past." I can explain that -- I have explained it in a book I've only partly written, because I only partly know the truth. It's called Betrayal. Copyright © 2002 by Nancy Pickard

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"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. If she doesn't cooperate, he promises, he will hurt someone close to her. Marie is merely unsettled until more threatening E-mails arrive and the young children of her lover, State Attorney Franklin DeWeese, become targets of vicious pranks." Until the police can apprehend her tormentor, Marie has no choice but to play along, following her "co-author's" instructions to write her life story and return to her birthplace, a small town in Alabama. There Marie seeks out a group of the town's most prominent citizens. Forty years ago, they worked clandestinely in the civil rights movement alongside her parents, who disappeared during the explosive summer of 1963. Trying to untangle the divided loyalties, secrets, lies, and misunderstandings that have obscured the truth about her parents, Marie races to unravel the secrets of the past and outwit a killer before she is forced to write her final page.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

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.

Library Journal

Pickard's new Marie Lightfoot mystery (after The Whole Truth and Ring of Truth) has an intriguing premise. A tabloid has just published a lurid article featuring Marie, focusing on her personal life and the unsolved disappearance of her parents in 1963. Marie then receives an e-mail from Paulie Barnes, who takes credit for the article and threatens to hurt her if she does not cooperate with his demands. He wants her to collaborate with him on writing a book about her own murder. Marie wonders if he is someone she has written about who wants revenge. She begins to believe that the connection is more personal, though, as Paulie forces her to investigate the circumstances of her parents' disappearance. What is the truth behind their apparent betrayal of the underground railroad they had founded? And can she find out in time to save herself? Pickard's narrative flags a bit in the middle, but the suspense returns in plenty of time for the denouement. Fans of the series won't be disappointed. Recommended for most public libraries. Laurel Bliss, Yale Arts Lib., New Haven, CT Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews