The Telling of Lies

Timothy Findley's turn to the murder mystery is told through the journal of Vanessa Van Horne, a landscape architect, photographer and longtime summer guest at the Aurora Sands Hotel on the coast of Maine. One blazing July afternoon, not long after an iceberg is spotted offshore, Calder Maddox, a pharmaceutical magnate of enormous wealth, dies on the beach in front of the hotel. Nessa's photographs of that day may hold the answer, and as she pieces together what happened she is drawn back into her own past, including her wartime years in a Japanese prison camp in Java. The novel weighs truth, loyalty and the lies people tell to protect one another, and it won the 1989 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original.