Synopsis:
It all depends on what you mean by the truth . . .
An accused killer insists she’s innocent of a heinous murder.
A grieving journalist surfaces from the wreckage of her shattered life.
Their unlikely alliance leads to a dangerous cat and mouse game.
Who can you trust when you can’t trust yourself?
There are three sides to every story. Yours. Mine. And the truth.
Review:
Hank Phillippi Ryan hails from Indianapolis, Indiana, and attended Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, where she majored in Shakespeare, as well as the International School in Hamburg, Germany. She landed her first job as a reporter in 1971 WIBC radio before taking a position as a legislative assistant with the Administrative Practice and Procedure Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C. NExt she joined Rolling Stone magazine as an editorial assistant in its Washington Bureau. She returned to television news in 1975 as a political reporter in Indianapolis before moving to Atlanta the following year, where she served as a political reporter and weekend anchor. She stayed there until 1983 when she WHDH in Boston where she was promoted to principal report for the investigative unit in 1989. She has won a staggering thrity-seven Emmy Awards and fourteen Edward R. Murrow Awards for her investigative and consumer reporting. But she is most proud of the fact that her reporting has resulted in the enactment of new laws, criminal covictions, homes saved from foreclosure, and victims and consumers receiving millions of dollars in restitution and as refunds.
Ryan published her first novels in 2007, kicking off a four-installment mystery series featuring a Boston television reporter names Charlotte McNally: Prime Time, Face Time, Air Time and Drive Time. The latter two were nominated for Anthony and Agatha awards for best novel of 2009 and 2010, respectively. She followed up with another thriller series, featuring Jane Ryland and Jake Brogan: The Other Woman, The Wrong Gir, Truth Be Told, What you See, and Say No More. She has earned Agatha, Anthony, Daphne, Macavity, and Mary Higgins Clark awards.
Trust Me is Ryan’s first stand-alone thriller and she describes it as an exploration of whether truth is even possible. Ryan has is married to Jonathan Shapiro, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer. She recalls sitting at their kitchen table on a Sunday evening, listening to Shapiro practice the closing argument he will soon give to the jury that will decide whether his client murdered a baby. As she listened, she became convinced that the story Shapiro was telling, referencing only the evidence adduced during the trial, was, in fact, true. “And then, I imagined another spouse, sitting at another kitchen table across town in Boston somewhere. She is listening to her husband present his closing arguments. Those of the prosecution.” Ryan says she wondered, “Is she as mesmerized as I am? As convinced, as certain? The prosecutor, of course, is arguing that my husband’s client is guilty! Using exactly the same evidence, as he is required to do, he has created a completely different version of what happened.” Ryan realized that each of the lawyers was asking the jury to trust him/her because they were telling the truth about what occurred. “I became more and more obsessed with the central question of truth. There was the prosecution side and the defense side — and then there was the truth. There were actually three sides to every story, I realized. It all depends what you mean by ‘the truth,'” Ryan notes. The seeds of Trust Me were planted.
As the story opens, Ashlyn Bryant is accused of murdering her beautiful three-year-old daughter, Tasha Nicole. When little Tasha went missing, Ashlyn insisted she did not know anything about her daughter’s fate, claiming she last saw the child when she left her with a babysitter named Valerie.
Tragically, Tasha’s body was found stuffed into a garbage bag, and Ashlyn was charged with her murder and held to stand trial.
Now the trial has become a gruesome spectacle, with the District Attorney claiming that “only Ashlyn” had the means and motive to harm Tasha. No physical evidence links Ashlyn to the heinous crime.
Mercer Hennessy knows about loss. Two years ago, her own three-year-old daughter, Sophie, was killed, along with Mercer’s husband, in a horrific vehicle accident. Since then, Mercer, a journalist, has been mired in grief.
When Mercer is given the assignment of following Ashlyn’s trial and writing a true crime book about it, she struggles to emerge from the wreckage of her own life. Watching the trial each day, Mercer is convinced that Ashlyn is guilty.
The surprise outcome of the trial throws the two women together. Theirs becomes an unlikely alliance and dangerous game of cat and mouse as Mercer attempts to elicit the truth from Ashlyn while growing increasingly dubious and afraid for her own safety. Before long, Mercer finds herself questioning every detail about her own life and relationships, including the marriage she thought was a happy, faithful one. She’s also re-examining the circumstances surrounding the deaths of her beloved husband and daughter.
Trust Me is based upon a unique. but contemporary premise. The characters are fully developed and intriguing. Ryan says that as she was writing, she found herself surprised by what Ashlyn said — “revealed herself to me on every page.” (Ryan eschews outlines, saying she does not know what is going to happen until she types the wordss. She does, however, maintain charts and timelines as she is writing so that she can double-check the details.) And as Ashlyn came more vividly to life, so did Mercer, each woman revealing her passions and motivations for her actions. Their repartee is fascinating. The book’s momentum stallsa bit mid-way — some scenes seem repetitive and y=the storyline fails to advance but the pace of the story picks back up.
Trust Me is a chilling tale about the powerful hold the manipulations and machinations of a psychopath can have on a rational, intelligent individual — especially someone who has already been rendered vulnerable. It is also a story of triumph over despair and the application of reason to outsmart a formidable, but ultimately flawed, psychopathic opponent. Iit is highly entertaining and engrossing.
Also by Hank Phillippi Ryan:
Comments are closed.