Description: A dead man's secrets. A girl's forgotten past. The key to both mysteries is buried within three pages torn from a Civil War diary, raising questions that will pit Sandi Beck against a small-town Southern dynasty, a billionaire developer, and her own conflicting desires.
Review Quotes:
The Lies We Are By Ann Eichenmuller
Review by Carol J. Bova (Chesapeake Style Magazine September 2018)
Once again, Ann Eichenmuller has written a page turner of a mystery that keeps the reader so involved, it's hard to put the book down. The mystery in The Lies We Areis laid out in the opening pages, but the unwinding of the tale carries you through to the reveal at the end.
The Lies We Are is the story of two linked mysteries that involve pages torn from a Civil War diary, a Northern Neck Virginia waterfront deal that threatens eagle nesting sites, and how Sandi Beck finds herself in the middle of all of it.
Sandi Beck, introduced in Ann's first novel, Kind Lies, has made a career of helping people solve their problems. It is her way of filling the cracks in her soul left after the death of her husband three years earlier when she was 32. But in The Lies We Are, 150 years have concealed secrets powerful people don't want revealed now and her discoveries will put Sandi's life at risk.
The action accelerates early in the story when Sandi meets a young grad student, Cilla Lewis, who has copies of three pages in faded, old fashioned handwriting that her father found in her late mother's Bible. Cilla believes the pages may have some connection to her father's family history, lost when he was orphaned as a small child. Sandi recognizes the writing from a picture of an open journal owned by one of her recent clients from an old Southern family.
The events in the book are so realistic, they could be happening just across the river in the next county. The people are as familiar as those at the local market, the marina or the college fundraiser. The depth
of understanding shown in the characters' motivations, fears and pain are remarkable. Sandi Beck's reactions as a young widow are shown in a low key and sensitive manner.
My favorite line in the book is, "These are the lies we tell ourselves, but they are not as dangerous as the ones we don't tell, the lies we are." Altogether, this is a well crafted book that I highly recommend to everyone who enjoys a good mystery with a great ending.
Ann Eichenmuller is the author of the non-fiction The Writing Rx, as well as the novels Kind Lies and The Lies We Are. She is an award winning essayist and travel writerwhose work has been featured in All at Sea, Chesapeake Style, Chesapeake Bay, and Motorhome magazines.
She has published several poems and short stories and co- written a musical, All Good Gifts, based on an O. Henry short story. A former Maryland educator, she received the Washington Post's Agnes Meyer Award for Excellence. Ann is a certified diver, private pilot, and something of an adventurer who counts sailing her boat to the Bahamas with husband Eric and their children as her favorite accomplishment.
Review - H. Scott Butler, PhD and author of the Cynthia Westbrook Mystery Series
An intriguing mystery of interlocking stories, The Lies We Are demonstrates Faulkner's observation that the past is never past. Ann Eichenmuller's introspective, kind-hearted heroine, a self-described personal advocacy consultant, is an appealing character, and, as in her first novel, the depiction of Southern manners and mores is entertainingly spot on.