Linda Hope Lee Tell Me No Lies

Tell Me No Lies

Linda Hope Lee

Five Star, Jan 2006, $26.95

ISBN: 1594144168

Seattle artist Julie Foster hides her relationship to her late grandfather Ben Gabriel from the Cooperville Murals Committee when she accepts the commission to paint three historical murals. Ben was arrested for embezzling funds from the Cooperville First national Bank forty years ago, but fled town before facing trial. He allegedly killed his accuser, bank president Cyrus Linscott, whose widow Millie hired her.

Julie meets Millie's grandson Gregory, a loan officer at the bank, when her SUV rams his new jeep. She commiserates with his feelings of damaging something new. Once he calms down, they quickly hit it off and begin to fall in love, but he makes it clear how important honesty is after a failed recent relationship. Just when she plans to tell him the truth, he learns from a private investigator just who she is. As she insists they should talk, he rejects her just like his family does. They buy out her contract so she leaves town heartbroken just like her mother warned her would happen.

TELL ME NO LIES is a strong character study that has two families seeing the same event differently as Julie refuses to believe her grandfather was a killer while the Linscott brood has no doubt about who murdered the family patriarch. The contemporary romance goes smoothly until the sleuth reports on the connection destroying what looks like a simple tale of love. When the truth is revealed at the end, fans will believe the finish simplified what was until then a complex relationship between two individuals in love potentially torn apart by how their families intertwined forty years ago.

Harriet Klausner