About Truth Be Told…

Fifteen-year-old Zan Edgefield’s life is a simple one. For ten years she has called a small Southern town her home and Gillian Watson her best friend. Equestrians, they share a dream to reach the top of their sport. They spend their days trudging through school and their afternoons schooling their horses—until the night Zan wakes to the sound of panicked knocks at the front door. It is Gillian, unable to speak, her face a mess of sweat and tears. Zan gets her friend a glass of water, returning to discover she has disappeared into the night. The Edgefields call the police, who deliver the impossible news: Gillian was murdered, her body found at 11:33pm—half an hour before she knocked on the Edgefield’s front door.

Hagen, Gillian’s troubled step-brother, is charged with the crime, leaving the Watsons with a daughter dead and a son to blame. He was found sobbing in his parked car a block away from the crime scene, his face scratched by fingernails. When the murder weapon is discovered in the trunk of Hagen’s car, it looks like an open-and-shut case. Zan alone knows that Hagen is innocent, thanks to Gillian’s continued midnight visits. Now it is her mission to exonerate him—a difficult task for anyone, let alone a teenage girl acting on a tenuous psychic link with a silent ghost.

Stoic, tenacious, and armed with an inky black sense of humor, Zan struggles to expose the truth before Hagen is convicted. She finds that small-town hatreds run deep, and sometimes those who are sworn to uphold the law are just as happy to break it. Consumed by Gillian’s desperate desire to see her family healed, Zan loses sight of just one thing: She is getting ever closer to the actual killer—a man who is ready to kill again.