“Andrew’s mother.” Leigh watched Walter look inside of the garbage bag. He turned over the VHS tapes to read the labels. Callie #8. Callie #12. Harleigh & Callie.
Walter asked, “What did she want?”
“Absolution.”
Walter threw the tapes back in the bag. “Did you give it to her?”
“No,” Leigh said. “You have to earn it.”
Dear Reader
Dear Reader
Early in my career, I chose to write my novels without marking a particular point in time. I wanted the stories to stand alone without news cycles or pop culture intruding into the narrative. My approach changed as I started working on my Will Trent series and standalones, when it became more important to me to anchor the books in the now as a way to hold up a mirror to society. I wanted to ask questions with my fiction, like how we got to #metoo （Cop Town）， how we became so inured to violence against women （Pretty Girls）， or even how we ended up with an angry mob breaking down the doors of the Capitol （The Last Widow）。
There’s always a delicate balance between writing about social issues and keeping up the driving pace of a thriller. I am at my very core a thriller author, and I never want to slow down or interfere with the rhythm of a story to climb onto a soapbox. I try very hard to present both sides, even when I don’t agree with the opposing opinion. With this in mind, I started framing the story that became False Witness. I knew that I wanted to incorporate the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but I also knew that the story was not about the pandemic so much as about how people are managing to live through it. And, of course, my perspective is not just as an American, or as a Georgian, or even as an Atlantan—like everyone else, how I view the world is seen through the lens of who I am as an individual.
As I started work in March 2020, I had to be somewhat of a futurist in trying to predict what life would be like in roughly one year’s time. Obviously, a lot changed over the course of my writing. At first we were told to forgo masks so that hospitals would not run out of supplies, then we were told that we should all be wearing masks （then double masks）; initially we were told to wear gloves, then we were told gloves offered a false sense of safety; first we were told to wash down our groceries, then we were told they’re fine; then there were the variants and so on and so on until finally, thankfully, the vaccines were released, which was wonderful news but also necessitated incorporating their somewhat confusing roll-out into a novel that was nearly finished—though it must be said that these were small hurdles compared to the worldwide loss and tragedy caused by this horrible virus.
As of this writing, we’ve crossed the devastating milestone of 500,000 dead in the United States. Then, there are the tens of millions of survivors—some of whom are experiencing Long-Covid or whose lives will be forever marked by the disease. Because of the inherent loneliness of a Covid death, our medical professionals have suffered untold trauma witnessing firsthand the ravages of this terrible virus. Our medical examiners, coroners, and funeral homes have endured an overwhelming volume of dead. Educators, frontline workers, first responders—the lists are endless because the pandemic has touched every single person on earth in ways both big and small. The impact of this daily mass casualty event will be felt for generations. Still unknown is how the suspension of grief will eventually seep out into our lives. We know from studying childhood abuse that trauma can lead to everything from depression, PTSD, cardiovascular issues such as stroke and heart attack, cancer, a heightened risk for drug and alcohol abuse and in some extreme cases, suicidal ideation. We have yet to reckon with what the world will look like in fifteen or twenty years’ time when Zoomers are raising children of their own.
Though I love my readers, I have always written my books for myself, using fiction to process the world around me. As I set out to realistically incorporate the pandemic into False Witness, I looked to recent history for cues. In many ways the evolution of our understanding of Covid-19 mirrors the beginning of what was then called the AIDS crisis, during which my generation experienced a painful coming of age. As with SARS-CoV-2, there were a lot of unknowns when HIV first reared its ugly head. Scientists didn’t immediately know how it was transmitted, how it worked, where it had come from—so the advisories changed almost monthly and the homophobia and racism ran rampant. And then of course the way people responded to HIV/AIDS ran the gamut from fear to anger to denial to acceptance to full-on fuck-its. Though AIDS was far, far more deadly than Covid （and transmission was thankfully not airborne）， a lot of those same attitudes have been on display in our response to the Covid-19 pandemic. And I should add that during both of these transformational tragedies, we have seen remarkable caring and kindness countering what feels like incomprehensible hate. Nothing brings out our humanity, or lack thereof, like a crisis.