Hard Truth

Lorna Temple has come back to her Pennsylvania hometown with one goal: sell the family property after the deaths of her parents, and then leave. The disappearance of two children twenty-one years ago is nowhere in her thoughts. Then the fields where she grew up give up human remains, and the past she meant to leave alone refuses to stay buried. The bones belong to Jason Eagan. Two decades ago his nine-year-old sister, Melinda, vanished on her birthday, and Jason, her sharp-tongued older brother, was quickly named as the only suspect. When he disappeared too, the investigation went cold. Now it seems he never got far from the Temple land. The local police are content to treat his death as the end of the story, with Melinda's killer dead and justice served. Lorna cannot accept that. She hires private investigator T. J. Dawson, and together they begin digging into what really happened to the two Eagan children and who stands to lose if the truth comes out. The deeper they go, the clearer it becomes that someone remembers those events very well and has no intention of being exposed. Hard Truth is a suspense novel by Mariah Stewart, the New York Times bestselling author of Dead Wrong. It follows a woman who planned a short, practical visit and finds herself the target of a killer determined to keep an old crime hidden.