The Last Truth

The Last Truth is about the damage done by living with denial and the burden of unwanted responsibility. It examines how a mother and her two children, separated from each other, find ways to live with the damage done by selfish need, the pretence of good intention and turning a blind eye. It leads each of them down a twisted path to violence. In trying circumstances the children are reunited as adults and, in sharing their stories, a terrible truth emerges. The truth cannot lay buried any longer and its uncovering results in tumultuous and shocking events enacted by those who urgently need to escape culpability or obliterate the challenge to what has been denied.

The vulnerability of the damaged individuals followed in The Last Truth is matched by that of the public services they encounter, whose agents and institutions are revealed as equally self serving and harmful. Their capacity to exercise their power to ‘manage’ truth, and act in ways that lay blame on individuals for circumstances they impose, is a recurring theme. It is a preoccupation of the characters whose behavior is shaped by their experience of public services.

The book will appeal to those readers interested in psychological drama and crime stories, but the layering of intimate psychological experience, the evolution of disorder, misuse of authority, protection of privacy, organizational violence and the moral questions of personal and organizational responsibility, may give it wider appeal. It asks whether it is reasonable for some people to be held solely responsible for their actions when so many influences contribute to what they have done? How should responsibility for harm be distributed when so many have caused it, but only a few have the protection of legitimate process to step away from accountability?

The Last Truth is, in the end, optimistic of the human condition, but not before a tough examination. The story is divided into three sections and is set in an industrial city in England.