National Network for Equitable Library Service

Lies may hurt, but the truth can be murder... A happily married man with three small children decides one day he no longer wants to live. He gives himself leukemia, and nine months later is dead. This is the conundrum Lisa Sitteroff is determined to solve regarding her long-dead father — the tale her mother Ruth repeated throughout Lisa's childhood. But Lisa, now 30 and watching her older brother Raff suffer from the ravages of bipolar illness, believes if she can solve this puzzle, she might somehow save him. For Raff's pain is intrinsically tied up with feelings of parental abandonment. What starts as a noble goal for Lisa, though, soon grows into a vicious family war that wreaks destruction on her marriage and upends her life. Shocking clues arise as she reads a letter her father wrote before he died, prompting her to go on a journey beset with conflicting tales and startling disclosures. Those who had known her father give hints of radiation exposure, a dangerous physics experiment and lurid affairs. But which stories are truth, and which are lies? Is truth only a matter of interpretation, or has the truth been colored by those hiding dark, terrible secrets? Although Lisa pays a high price in her search for the father she never knew, she finds an answer to the conundrum that brings her to a place of healing and reconciliation. She had sought to save her brother, but in the end, unknowingly, she saves herself.