RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON'S most stunning novel, Silent Witness, is a story of rivalry, friendship, and loss, and how the tragedies of youth can change the course of our adulthood.
It begins in 1967, in a small Midwestern town scarcely touched by the tumults of the decade. Seventeen-year-old Tony Lord, Lake City's star athlete, seems destined for great things. His driving ambition to move far beyond the narrow world of his parents and his hometown is precisely what attracts Alison Taylor, the beautiful and enigmatic daughter of the town's leading family, and it is what sets Tony apart from his two closest friends: Sam Robb--mercurial and charismatic, his only rival for athletic honors--and Sam's girl, Sue Cash, whose affection for Tony may mask something more.
But suddenly everything changes. Alison Taylor is brutally murdered. Tony is the number one suspect. The town turns against him. His friendship with Sam is destroyed. When Tony leaves Lake City, vowing never to return, the loss of Sue is his sole regret.
And it is Sue's urgent phone call, twenty-seven years later, that changes Tony's life once more.
For Tony Lord is now a San Francisco lawyer seemingly divorced from his youth. But the bitter lessons of Alison's murder have made him what he is--a relentless advocate dedicated to the defense of his clients. Sue's plea for help is one he cannot ignore: her husband, Sam Robb, now the vice principal of Lake City High School, is suspected of the hideous murder of a female student.
Tony's return to Lake City plunges him into the most deeply rooted conflicts of his own past: the revulsion he feels for the crime for which Sam may be charged; the revival of his feelings for Sue; the town's lingering suspicion that Tony is himself a murderer. And Tony finds that he is reliving his most complex relation of all: his friendship with Sam Robb. In the merciless crucible of a murder trial, Tony must confront not only the fear that Sam is a murderer, but the concealed passions and buried truths that underlie Alison's death.
Masterful in his portrayal of friendship and rivalry between men, the claims of the past on the present, and the darkest recesses of love, Silent Witness is that rare suspense novel which is far more--the kind of story that we have come to expect from Richard North Patterson.
RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON'S eight novels include the internationsl best-sellers Degree of Guilt, Eyes of a Child, and The Final Judgment. He has won an Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. A graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and Case Western Reserve School of Law, he also studied creative writing with Jesse Hill Ford at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. He and his wife, Laurie, live with their family in San Francisco and on Martha's Vineyard.
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