Bury The Lead by Cassondra Windwalker

Weekly newspaper editor Jeff Paine's mind is filled with the detritus of newspaper clippings, presidential tweets, crossword puzzles, and horoscopes. When his artist girlfriend Ada Grigori announces her intention to leave him, he becomes obsessed with finding—or manufacturing—connections between otherwise unrelated events. Driven by professional curiosity and unrelenting cynicism, Paine uses his newspaper to manipulate the people of his hometown of Brisby, Colorado into revealing the ugliness lurking beneath their placid exteriors. A series of gruesome dog mutilations already have the town on edge when Paine’s carefully worded and technically factual stories stir up vigilante justice against a harmless old homeless man. Spurred on by the unexpected ease of his success, Paine sets his sights on exploiting the town’s hidden prejudices for financial gain and his own amusement. Meanwhile, no-one but Paine notices that a young transient man has gone missing. Exasperated with the plasticity of public sentiment and consumed by his own search for truth, Paine creates a trail of evidence that will ultimately both convict him of murder and set him free on appeal. The public will never know the truth of what became of Ada or of the young transient Brett, but the reader will have all the answers…if she can decipher them. Bury The Lead draws readers into the mind of a brilliant but highly unreliable narrator, forcing them to question their own perceptions of objective truth and the existence of a free press in a world where an unsubstantiated tweet can carry more power than an investigative report.

Adult • Literary Fiction • Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense/Psychological Thrillers • Humor and Satire