Deceit by James Siegel

This is what I am listening to, actually. I have recently finished this book on CD and now I am going back and reading everything James Siegel ever wrote. He's a mesmerizing writer with a fertile imagination and pitch-perfect understanding of moral ambiguity and human flaws. Maybe not too surprising for the author is Senior Creative Director and Vice President of the BBDO advertising agency in New York.

Tom Valle, ignominiously dismissed from a newspaper the level of the NY Times finds himself in the backwater burg of Littleton, California where he is the reporter for local paper.

His editor sends him out on a routine automobile fatality story but he recognizes almost immediately that something is hinky. Trouble is, nobody seems to see what he sees. He continues to uncover cover-ups, lies, twists and turns that go back decades in his quest for the truth.

The truth. For Valle that's an interesting ideal. He was fired from his last job because he fabricated news stories and it led not only to his dismissal but to the fall of a great editor. Now he's on the trail of a very important, potentially world changing mystery which could re-establish him ... if only he would be believed.

I'm not sure I believed him and I'm not sure to this moment whether or not Siegel wanted Valle to be believed. Is everything that Valle finds out true, a delusion, a lie? Some of it seems so fantastical, yet somehow possible, almost plausible that this reader found herself asking this question at every turn. Has his firing sent Valle 'round the twist? Is he calculating that a big lie is more believable than small ones? Has he really stumbled one of the most significant cover-ups of all time ... quiet and masked in this little California town?

Well, dear reader, that's up to you to decide.

Mill Valley resident Phil Sheridan was a perfect choice as the reader for this novel. His voice teases out the quirkiness of each character and beautifully conveys the transformation of Tom Valle from world-weary and burnt out to reinvigorated and determined.

I highly recommend this. It is available as a book, a book on CD and a book on cassette. (link to our catalog here.)

~mel