Michael McAuliffe has been a practicing lawyer for over 30 years. He was a federal prosecutor serving both as an assistant US attorney in the Southern District of Florida and an honors program trial attorney in the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC. Michael and his wife Robin Rosenberg, a US district judge, have three children and live in Florida and Massachusetts. Aside from the law and writing, Michael is an alpine mountaineer, having climbed and reached the summits of Aconcagua, Denali, Kilimanjaro (with his eldest daughter), Island Peak in the Himalayas, and many other mountains in the Rockies, the Cascades, and the Andes.
In his debut novel, the legal thriller No Truth Left to Tell, flaming crosses light up the Louisiana town of Lynwood in 1994, terrorizing the town. The resurgent Klan wants a new race war, and they’ll start it here. As civil rights prosecutor, Adrien Rush is about to discover the ugly roots of the past run deep in Lynwood. Rush arrives from DC and investigates the crimes with Lee Mercer, a seasoned local FBI special agent. Their partnership is tested as they clash over how far to go to catch the racists before the violence escalates.
Michael McAuliffe stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about how he researched and wrote the book:
I wrote the novel No Truth Left To Tell in three years, but I researched it for thirty.
The novel’s young protagonist, Adrien Rush, is a federal civil rights prosecutor who is sent to the South to investigate a series of hate crimes. Decades ago, I, too, was a young federal civil rights prosecutor sent to the South to investigate hate crimes. During the time I worked as a trial lawyer at the Justice Department, and later as an assistant US attorney, I witnessed, participated in, and collected a great many stories that touch the subjects and characters in the novel. I did investigate and prosecute the leader of the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan. I also investigated and prosecuted a number of cases involving police brutality. One such police matter included torture similar to that depicted in the book. From early in my legal career, I believed the cases I and others prosecuted made for dramatic stories. So, the basic elements for the novel existed for decades before I typed the first word into a MacBook.
I, however, didn’t have the insight or maturity thirty years ago to translate the emotional truths of my experiences into an entertaining and compelling story. Luckily, the intervening years provided ample opportunity to humble, toughen, challenge, and ultimately reward my creative instincts. My varied (some might say disparate) career as a federal prosecutor, big firm law partner, law professor and global company general counsel, created fertile, tilled soil for me to better appreciate the inherent dramas of the law. After all, it’s the law that guides, bounds and protects us as a society, or is supposed to do so.
After I committed to write the novel, I revisited actual events, issues and cases, to ensure the fundamental aspects of the story were realistic, or at least plausible. I also wanted to pull notable traits or habits from individuals I had known as a young lawyer and mix them into the novel’s characters. That process was less an exercise of research than a mining of memory. I knew most of the procedural parts of the story from my professional work, but the creation of a compelling story and characters proved a more difficult endeavor.
After several jumbled starts, I realized that, as a writer of fiction, I had to nurture a world in which plausibility yielded to imagination in the service of entertainment. Once I grew more assertive imagining the characters and living with them in the story (and occasionally outside as I wondered how a character might handle a real-world issue), the path revealed itself. I didn’t recognize at the time that rewriting (and rewriting) and editing waited hidden around the corner!
Of course, for an author, it begins and ends with whether a reader enjoys the story and a connection is made, however brief. That’s a matter of the heart, not facts.
You can learn more about Michael McAuliffe via his website, or follow him on LinkedIn and Goodreads. No Truth Left to Tell is now available from all major booksellers.
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