Deceit Summary

     Tom Valle is a former star reporter who built his career on sand, fabricating dozens of stories before being caught and reduced to a pariah. Valle lands a job at a small, newspaper in Littleton, California, where he is relegated to covering human-interest stories and writing local pieces. It looks like just another car crash: a head-on collision on a stretch of desert highway that leaves one driver dead. Yet Tom Valle, the local newspaperman assigned to the story, is damned good at spotting lies. Seeking personal redemption and the resurrection of his career, Valle investigates a trail of cover-up, fraud, and murder stretching back for decades. But the path of corruption is so dark, Valle wonders if this story will redeem him, or kill him and he soon finds himself alone in an investigation of which neither the police nor his newspaper, have much interest in.

Deceit Excerpt

      I am writing this as fast as I can. I am galloping through hostile territory like the Pony Express, because I absolutely must deliver the mail.
      I've already taken my fair share of arrows. And though I'm clearly wounded, I'm not dead.
      Not yet. I'm trying mightily to remember everything germane. I'm a bit shaky on the timeline, on the cause and effects. On specificity.
      I am freely and honestly admitting to this. Just so when all the little editors begin flourishing their red pencils, and they will, I'll have hopefully, if only momentarily, dulled the momentum of their onrushing venom.
      I don't blame them. I truly don't. I am, after all, the boy who cried wolf. Who shouted, screamed, and plastered it across two-inch headlines.