Bearing Secrets; - 1st Edition/1st Printing

Cryptic secrets that originated in 1960s Berkeley are reborn thirty years later as private investigator Wil Hardesty probes the mystery behind a downed plane, a middle-aged man's suicide, and an embittered young woman. By the author of The Innocents.

In his second time out (after The Innocents), "off and on" PI Wil Hardesty takes on a case with a legacy of "sins... that cast shadows across generations." Rooted in the turbulent, anti-war movement of the 1960s, this complex drama has a cast that includes terrorist groups, corrupt attorney Lincoln Stillman and Stillman's lethally beautiful wife, Monika. Hardesty is also struggling to keep his marriage together after his young son's death and his wife's recent miscarriage. The discovery of a plane that crashed in a California lake in 1974, and its $2-million cargo, precipitates former anti-war activist Max Pfeiffer's suicide. He leaves behind his daughter, Holly, and, with her, his conviction that the FBI murdered her mother. Holly is equally convinced that the FBI is responsible for her father's death. Holly hires Hardesty. He turns up solid evidence linking Max to kidnapping, bank robbery and murder 20 years before, which provides a world-shattering epiphany for Holly. After she is kidnapped, Hardesty must find her before she is transformed into the "perfect terrorist" to serve Monika's cause. Although sometimes tenuous, the links between Max, Holly, Stillman and Monika are intriguing enough to keep the reader enthralled as they unfold.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Another out-of-the-past case for surfer/shamus Wil Hardesty (The Innocents, 1995), who's hired, barely, by Holly Pfeiffer because nobody else will listen to her rantings about how her aging activist father Max was hounded to his death by the FBI. Despite nonstop battles with his intransigent client, who is truly her father's daughter, it doesn't take Wil long to trace the links between Max and the 20-year-old kidnapping of little Angela DeBray--an act of political protest-cum-fundraising that turned nightmarish when the girl's captors in the Army of Revolutionary Vigilance (ARV) killed her. Most of the ARV are long dead now, but the feds, who've always figured wild-eyed Max as the go-between in the snatch, just won't let go of Holly. Neither, it turns out (in the story's least inspired twist), will ARV lawyer Lincoln Stillman's wife Monika, who plans to grab Holly, turn her into ``the perfect terrorist,'' and farm her out to the dreaded Ammad Nassir, Scourge of Jerusalem. Closer to home, Wil finds truly monstrous skeletons fairly bursting from the closets of the Pfeiffers and the DeBrays: Back in the bad old days of the revolution, it seems, everybody knew everybody, and everybody did every unspeakable thing imaginable. If you can overlook the nouveau-terrorist angle--and you get an awful lot of other stuff to worry about--this tangled tale smolders like slow-fuse dynamite, and Barre skewers each sorry player with a master's deadly accuracy. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

California private investigator Wil Hardesty investigates the alleged suicide of a Sixties radical at Lake Tahoe. When the FBI reveals evidence connecting the dead man to a 17-year-old kidnapping and murder, a wealthy and unscrupulous lawyer, his coldly manipulative wife, and her ruthless bodyguard rob a bank, fire-bomb a house, and engage in surveillance and murder. Meanwhile, Hardesty's marriage is suffering, and he is forced to cope with his client, the dead man's daughter. Good narrative, inventive plot, striking characters, and psychological depth make this a keeper. Recommended.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The apparent suicide of counterculture lawyer Max Pfeiffer has prompted the ex-Berkeley radical's daughter, Holly, to hire Wil Hardesty to determine if her dad really killed himself. Hardesty agrees, despite believing that Pfeiffer did indeed commit suicide after the discovery of a 20-year-old plane wreck implicated him in a drug deal. To Holly, raised with a true radical's sense of paranoia, it was a setup. When Holly's mountain home is blown up by a well-armed, very large man, Wil admits that sometimes paranoids are right. Wil works back through Max's past and eventually finds ties to an international terrorist group with a vendetta against him. Toss in Wil's floundering marriage, a tentative relationship with the much-younger Holly, and her estrangement from her father's wealthy family, and one has a Ross MacDonald^-like tale in which the past never lets go and families are the source of both our greatest pain and greatest joy. A solid, intelligent mystery. Wes Lukowsky