{"product_id":"hard-truth-isbn-9780345476678","title":"Hard Truth","description":"\u003cb\u003eFrom \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling author Mariah Stewart comes a novel of sexy romantic suspense for fans of Nora Roberts, Catherine Coulter, and Karen Robards.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTELL THE TRUTH AND SHAME THE DEVIL\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Two children who mysteriously disappeared twenty-one  years ago are the last thing on Lorna Temple’s mind when she returns to her Pennsylvania  hometown to sell the old family property in the wake of her parents’ passing. But  instead of memories, the fields where Lorna grew up yield something utterly chilling.  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e All those years ago, when nine-year-old Melinda Eagan vanished on her birthday,  her foulmouthed older brother, Jason, quickly became the lone suspect. Yet when he  went missing, too, the case turned cold. But Jason, it seems, never got far: His  bones have been moldering on the Temples’ land for two decades. As far as the local  police are concerned, the book is closed on Melinda’s murder–and Jason’s death is  justice served. But Lorna refuses to let the dead rest uneasily. She turns to private  eye T. J. Dawson to dig up the dirt of the past and see what lies beneath. Only there’ s someone out there who hasn’t forgotten–and who won’t be the least bit forgiving  about being exposed as a killer.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In matters of crime, there are many versions of  the truth.Mariah Stewart is the bestselling author of numerous novels and several novellas. A RITA finalist for romantic suspense, she is the recipient of the Award of Excellence for contemporary romance, a RIO (Reviewers International Organization) Award honoring excellence in women’s fiction, and a Reviewers’ Choice Award from Romantic Times magazine. A three-time recipient of the Golden Leaf Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award winner from the New Jersey Romance Writers, she has been inducted into their Hall of Fame. A native of Hightstown, New Jersey, she lives with her husband, two daughters, and two rambunctious golden retrievers amid the rolling hills of Chester County, Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Valley Forge Romance Writers, the New Jersey Romance Writers, and the Romance Writers of America.Callen, Pennsylvania  \u003cbr\u003eAugust 2005\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The two-lane road meandered languidly through a countryside alive with the  colors of late summer. The sun was still uncomfortably hot at four in the  afternoon, hot enough that the jacket Lorna Stiles had worn when she set  out that morning from Woodboro—  forty miles south of Pittsburgh—had long since been removed and tossed  into the backseat. At some point while traveling the Pennsylvania  Turnpike, it had slid onto the floor behind the driver’s seat, but Lorna  had failed to notice. There’d been plenty to think about during the drive  east across the state, to her hometown of Callen. A soiled jacket was the  least of her worries.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Change had been slow to come in this southernmost tip of eastern  Pennsylvania, where Amish and Mennonite farms were interspersed with  pricey new housing developments. The one gas station in town was now  pump-your-own and was attached to a convenience store, but the stores in  the little strip mall on the corner still remained closed on Sundays.  While the facades remained the same, the once ramshackle old house on the  opposite corner—boarded up as little as three years ago—now housed a day  spa and a boutique, while its counterpart across the street had been  spiffed up and turned into apartments, with the first floor converted into  a bakery and coffee shop. And most noticeably, a housing development was  growing in a field where corn once grew a half mile from the intersection  that served as the center of town.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A sign of the times. Lorna sighed, and wondered how many other farmers had  been approached by   developers who wielded huge sums of cash, much more than the farms were  pulling in from crops these days. Hadn’t her own mother sold off thirty  acres of their land sixteen months ago to pay her medical bills?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A horn sounded behind her, urging her to make up her mind. Turn or go  straight.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Lorna went straight, then pulled to the side of the road, waving the  impatient driver behind her to go on his merry way. She sat for a moment  and read the names on the mailboxes: Hammond, Taylor, Keeler. All names  she knew well.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Veronica Hammond had been best friends with Lorna’s grandmother, Alice  Palmer, and would be in her eighties now. Corrie Taylor had been one of  Lorna’s field hockey teammates, and Mike Keeler had been her first love.  His brother, Fritz, had taught her how to drive a pickup. Over the past  month, she’d received a card or letter from each of the families,  following the death of her mother.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mrs. Hammond, in particular, had written a touching note, remembering  Lorna’s mother as a young girl. “She was a lovely child, your mother was.  I can still see her chasing the baby rabbits in your grandmother’s garden,  holding out lettuce leaves, hoping   to entice them closer. How disappointed Mary Beth would be when they ran  from her—she’d only wanted to play. She was certainly Alice’s pride and  joy . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Making a mental note to pay a visit to the Hammond home before she left  Callen for good, Lorna checked her mirrors for traffic before pulling out  onto the road again. She drove another three-quarters of a mile, then  slowed, her turn signal clicking away as she made a right into the wide  drive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The red brick house she’d grown up in never changed, for all of its one  hundred fifty-plus years. The door was painted dark green, the shutters  black. The magnolia tree she’d climbed as a child still stood in the  backyard, though a lightning strike two years ago had resulted in an ugly  split down the middle. Her mother would have had the tree taken down had  her focus not been on other things. Like putting up a fierce fight against  the disease that, in the end, took her in spite of her bravado and her  most valiant efforts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Lorna parked under the magnolia and looked through the open windows to the  fields beyond the barn, which long ago had been painted white but now was  weathered to a pale gray. The parcel of land her mother had sold to the  developer sat at the far end of the property, so the new homes would not  be visible from the farmhouse, except from the second or third floors. She  wondered how many homes were being built on the land where several  generations of Palmer farmers had planted every spring and harvested every  fall. Maybe tomorrow she’d take a walk across the back field and see just  what was what.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Her last correspondence from anyone in Callen who’d mentioned the  development was a short note from Gene Enderle, who graduated from the  local regional high school a few years before Lorna. He’d written her  hoping she could do something to override her mother’s decision to sell  the land, citing everything from concern for the wetlands to the potential  for overcrowding and too many cars clogging the local roads. Lorna had  called him after receiving his note, a call that had left her with the  distinct impression that Gene just didn’t like change in general, and  change in and around Callen in particular. Some people didn’t, but she’d  been surprised to find that sort of resistance in someone so young.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Lorna was well aware that if circumstances had been different, none of the  Palmer farm would have been sold. If her father hadn’t died of that heart  attack eighteen years ago, for example, leaving her mother to raise and  educate three kids alone. As it was, with her mother’s expenses already in  excess of her insurance to the tune of one hundred thirty thousand  dollars, the family really hadn’t had much choice. It was sell off some  land, or her mother went without the radiation and chemotherapy her  doctors had recommended.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Put in that context, no discussion had been necessary among Mary Beth’s  children, other than how much land to sell off at any given time. Lorna’s  younger sister, Andrea, married, the mother of two young children—she was  now expecting her third—and living in Oklahoma, had left it all up to  Lorna. Rob, the youngest and only boy, an aspiring actor who had left for  Los Angeles the day he turned eighteen and had never come back, hadn’t  bothered to respond to the several messages Lorna had left on his  answering machine, which really hadn’t surprised her at all, though he’d  had plenty to say about it when he came home for the small, private  memorial. Once he found out how much the land could be worth, that is.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the end, Lorna did what she felt was best for their mother. The money  from the sale had given Mary Beth fifteen months of treatment in a fine   hospital thirty minutes from Lorna’s house. Lorna wouldn’t have traded  those fifteen months for all the Palmer land. In the end, her mother had  lost the fight anyway, and the loss of a few acres was totally irrelevant,  as far as Lorna was concerned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She got out of the car, marveling at how quiet it was even for a Sunday  afternoon in late summer. She inhaled deeply, recognizing the familiar  smells of earth after a rain—wild roses and ripe grapes. A few daylilies  were still in bloom along the fence that surrounded the field across the  drive from the house, and Lorna wondered if someone had been tending them.  When Lorna first moved Mary Beth to Woodboro, where Lorna’s home and  business were located, she’d asked Gil Compton, a neighboring farmer, to  keep an eye on the property and let her know when things needed to be  done, and had offered to pay his son to mow the grass. Mr. Compton had  kept the property as neat as Lorna’s father had, made sure the heating oil  in the tank never ran out and the timer never failed to turn the lights on  inside the house every night, but he refused every attempt she’d made to  pay him for his troubles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No trouble at all, Lorna,” he’d insisted. “Your mother was a godsend when  our oldest was in that car accident a few years back, driving my wife down  to Wilmington three times a week to the hospital. If it weren’t for her,  neither of us would have been there when Kevin died. Thanks to Mary Beth,  at least Kim was with him at the end. So you just go on and do what you  have to do for your mother, and don’t you give a second thought to what’s  going on down here. I’ll take care of the farm as if it were my own.”Nationally bestselling author of Dead End She didn't come home to stay. But a killer can't bear to see her leave.","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301112074469,"sku":"NP9780345476678","price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345476678.jpg?v=1767728709","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/hard-truth-isbn-9780345476678","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}