Last year, I practically binge-read seven Nancy Pickard books from her Jenny Cain series. Ring of Truth is the second of three books from her Marie Lightfoot series, the first I've read from this trio.
Marie is a writer of true crime books; the trial has ended for the latest murder she researched and she's just finished her book. However, she has a nagging feeling that something's not right. Marie begins to review her data, and interspersed with chapters which deal in the present, are chapters from her book, a nice book-within-a-book device, which serves to fill us in on the crime and her research about it. A minister, Bob Wing, a foe of capital punishment, had been found guilty of murdering his wife, a brutal bludgeoning that broke nearly every bone in her body. A possible accomplice, a woman friend that some people in the congregation thought he was having an affair with, had been found not guilty by the same jury. It seemed a bit ironic that the minister was now in the same death row area as Steve Orbach, a young man that the minister had been trying to help prior to his own arrest.The very day that Marie has shipped off the book to her editor, she is visited by a Jenny, a young girl who'd found the body of the murdered woman while exploring an abandoned old house near Florida's Intracoastal Waterway with a friend. The little girls had kept souvenirs from the murder scene, and Jenny's mother wanted to get rid of the items, but couldn't find anyone in authority who would take them now that the trial was over, so Marie takes custody. Meanwhile, we learn more about the murder that Steve Orbach was convicted of; the details of his crime turn out to provide more than mere background for the minister's own plight.
Pickard develops her characters and builds her plot so very intricately, allowing me to think I'm honing in on some important details, but later I see that she was in charge all along. Oh the twists! I loved this book!
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