Finally, he has kept silent about a major crime committed by a coworker. And he is tormented by his relationship with his father, who left him alone at a young age to take care of his younger brothers but has never shown him any affection. His relationship with his wife Laurie is on the skids. His daughter Lizzie was returned home but already ran away again. A huge forest fire is threatening his father’s place as well as the forest he and his father planted, and he knows his father won’t evacuate. The pressure comes down to Villani to concentrate on this crime and drop the investigation of the girl’s murder, but Villani is not willing to do that.īesides pressures at work, Villani has other troubles. Also, the management is reluctant to divulge the names of the owners.Ī bit later, they are called to a scene of torture and murder of two thugs in a local gang. When his team begins trying to collect data from the building’s security people, they are told there was a big system outage that night because of an opening at the attached casino, so they have no camera footage and cannot tell whose key card was used to enter the condo. Villani is even more affected because she looks like his 15-year-old daughter, Lizzie, who has run away from home. At a brand new, very expensive condo, the body of a young girl is discovered, in her teens, maybe, and clearly having suffered abuse before her death. Stephen Villani has just been made the head of the Victoria Homicide Squad, and he’s already exhausted. It has witty dialogue but not the lightness of some of the others. Of the Peter Temple novels I’ve read, Truth strikes me as the most hard-boiled.

Truth by Peter Temple