Spoiler note: This post discusses some early background details from Silent Truth. If you have not finished Book 1 in The Truth Series and prefer to discover everything on the page, save this one for later.

I set Silent Truth in 1960 southwest Georgia for several deliberate reasons.

I wanted a world without modern technology. No cell phones. No internet. No computers. Once someone disappeared, they could stay disappeared. When Rosalie runs, that isolation makes her flight both more possible and more dangerous. The lack of instant communication is essential to the tension of the story.

I also needed World War II to still cast a long shadow. Walter carried the war with him. His combat experience, layered on top of childhood trauma and years in prison, helped shape the broken man he became. At the same time, Jeannie Wright lost her husband at Pearl Harbor. Those two experiences sit close to the heart of the book’s central question: what do people do with the worst things that have happened to them?

1960 was a hinge year for women. Expectations were beginning to shift, even as the old rules of misogyny remained firmly in place. That quiet tension runs through the story.

Finally, I chose southwest Georgia because of its layered racial history. The connection between the McCurdy and Wilson families goes back four generations. James McCurdy once owned Jacob Wilson. Against the expectations of that era, the two men formed an unlikely friendship. After emancipation, James hired Jacob and eventually willed him the seventy-five acres the Wilson family has lived on ever since. That unlikely gift of land became both a home and a burden.

Generations later, Hank McCurdy could never accept a black man owning land that had once belonged to his ancestors. His hatred shaped the lives of everyone on both sides of the property line. The Wilsons learned to move carefully. They knew certain lines could not be crossed. The past was never only history—it was a living pressure that could turn dangerous without warning.

The setting isn’t backdrop. It shapes what the characters can and cannot do, what they can hide, and what they are forced to face.

1960 southwest Georgia gave me the isolation, the weight of war, the early shifts in women’s roles, and a racial history that refuses to stay buried. All of it was necessary for the story I wanted to tell.

If you decide to step into that world, I hope the place itself feels as alive and heavy as the people who live there.

And if you’d like to stay connected as the next story unfolds, you’re welcome to join the email list.

— Mary Anne

I didn’t set out to write a dark book. I set out to write an honest one. Silent Truth is a story full of hard things—violence, betrayal, broken families, and the kind of quiet damage that settles into a person’s bones and stays there. Some readers will find it heavy. I understand that. I wrote it that way on purpose.

It is a rural noir story set in 1960 southwest Georgia, full of the grit and moral gray that comes with that time and place. But underneath the crime and the tension is a question I keep returning to: What do people do with the worst things that have happened to them? Some are destroyed by it. Some become dangerous because of it. And some, somehow, find a way to keep going without letting the darkness have the last word.

That is the heart of Silent Truth.

I wrote it because I believe there is still hope in the horrific. Not the cheap kind of hope that pretends the darkness wasn’t real. The harder kind. The kind that looks straight at what people are capable of doing to each other and still refuses to let that be the final word. That belief is rooted in my faith in God. I don’t force it into every scene, and I don’t use the story as a sermon. But it is the ground I stand on. It is the reason I can write about the worst parts of human nature without drowning in them.

I also wrote this book because trauma is not rare. So many people carry silent wounds. Childhoods that were unsafe. Homes that looked fine from the outside and felt like something else entirely on the inside. Losses that reshaped them. My own mother was one of those people. She never experienced the kind of violence that appears in these pages, but she knew what it was to live with deep, lasting hurt—the kind that locks itself inside and quietly shapes a life. Over the years, the memories played over and over in her mind, leaving her feeling dejected and defeated. It was her faith that took her on a long spiritual journey of emotional cleansing and brought her to a place where she could finally forgive what she would never forget. The memories still hurt, but she has found that forgiveness is the key that unlocks the prison door. Watching her carry that pain, and watching her spend decades trying to rise above it, stayed with me. It made me want to write characters who are not simply “good” or “bad,” but human—scarred, complicated, and still capable of choosing something better than what was done to them.

I wrote this book for the people who know what it is to carry something heavy. I wrote it for anyone who has ever looked at the broken parts of the world—or the broken parts of their own story—and wondered if hope still has a place there. I believe it does.

If you decide to step into Millwood with Rosalie, Walter, Earl, and the rest, I hope you feel the weight of the story. And I hope, when you close the book, you also feel the thread of something stronger running underneath it.

If you’d like to stay connected as the next story unfolds, you’re welcome to join the email list. No noise—just the occasional note about the books and the road ahead.

Thank you for being here at the beginning.

— Mary Anne