I just finished “The Whole Truth” by Christy award-winning author James Scott Bell last night, after reading it in virtually two sittings. Wow. That’s about all I can say. Well, not really – you know I can talk the hind leg off a mule.
When Steve Conroy was five years old, two masked men came into his bedroom and kidnapped his older brother, seven-year-old Robert. They didn’t find him until it was too late, and Steve was wracked with the worst guilt. He didn’t call out when the men came – they threatened to kill Robert—and he just knows that if he’d yelled, everything would be fine. His father can’t forgive him, either, and ends up taking his own life. Steve turns to drug abuse as he gets older, trying to forget everything that has happened, and somehow manages to make it through law school. Now as an adult and a practicing lawyer, he has a ruined marriage to add to his list of regrets, and he wonders if he’ll ever be “normal.”
One day he gets a call to come down to the prison to talk to an inmate. This inmate claims to be Steve’s brother, Robert, although how can that be? Robert’s body was found and identified by dental records. However, the longer he and Steve talk, the more Steve is convinced it has to be Robert. He knows things only Robert could know.
Anxious to atone for the past, Steve agrees to be his brother’s lawyer. But there’s a lot he doesn’t know. Robert now goes by the name Johnny LaSalle, having been taken in by a preacher named Eldon LaSalle. Eldon has a commune and practices polygamy, ritual abuse, and absolute obedience, and his followers all believe him to be a prophet of God. He wants Steve to help him set up a legal church, but Steve strongly suspects he wants to use the church as a cover for illegal activity. The more involved Steve gets, the more his suspicions are confirmed, until he goes against Eldon and Johnny and faces their wrath. He has a choice to make – go along with it and keep his skin, or defy them, and lose his life?
This book was filled with great emotional drama as well as physical danger. The suspense was tight and gripping, yet not graphic. There were elements of faith included in the book, but it was by no means preachy. This is Christian suspense done right, and I highly recommend it.
(This book was published by Zondervan in 2008.)
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