Truth Be Told by Michele Hartlove

About the book

A reporter for the Washington Post, Cassandra O'Neil Pierce is on a mission: to find out whether the untimely death of CIA Director Leonard McPhearson, reportedly due to a cancerous brain tumor, was instead a U.S. government-directed murder.

Cassandra is called by widow Sally McPhearson to investigate the Director's death, which occurs the week he is scheduled to testify in a Congressional hearing on the CIA's role in the Iraq-Bio-Warfare Scheme, an illicit plan between the United States and post-war Iraq to manufacture biological warfare in an effort to keep the U.S. positioned as the world's superpower at all costs.

While visiting Sally at her vacation home in Captiva Island, Florida, Cassandra is shocked to see Michael Rockford, her high school English teacher with whom she fell in love and had a stormy relationship many years ago. Michael has tracked Cassandra down on the beach to tell her he is now divorced and still in love with her. But Cassandra is plagued by the painful memories of loving someone who she could never have because of their age difference and societal pressures, and Michael's betrayal when he married another woman instead of waiting her her.

Michael asks Cassandra for her forgiveness and the possibility of a future with her, despite the fact that she is now married to Post editor Grant Pierce. Unable to resist her pent up feelings for him, Cassandra realizes she is still in love with Michael and the two unite.

Returning home to her husband in D.C., guilty about her affair with Michael and torn about her future, Cassandra delves into the McPhearson story and tries to put her personal life aside. But in trying to uncover the truth, Cassandra is faced with a series of threats, first to her father who is running for the U.S. Senate, and then to her brother, who uses his position as a doctor at the hospital where McPhearson was operated on and died to gain needed information for her story. At a time when she is pregnant and most vulnerable, Cassandra is ultimately threatened that her secret affair with Michael will be exposed to Grant before she has faced her feelings and a decision about her future.

Cassandra must decide whether to write the truth on the McPhearson story, and whether to reveal her own personal truth, knowing the consequences for both may be to leave everything -- her family, her husband and her baby -- for a man who has stolen her heart since childhood.

About the author

Michele Hartlove was born and raised near Baltimore, Maryland, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1983.

She has been a professional writer since graduation, first as a reporter for several newspapers in Maryland and Delaware, then as an advertising agency copy writer and now as a novelist. She currently is president of her own advertising agency, which she started in 1990.

Hartlove has won numerous awards for her writing endeavors, including the Maryland State Bar Association Gavel Award for a Newspaper Editorial, several International Association of Business Communicators awards, and first place in the drama/romance category in the 2001 Maryland Writers Association Fiction Contest.

She lives with her husband and three children in North East, Maryland where she enjoys reading, art and travel in addition to writing.