1967, Lake City, Ohio. Tony Lord and Sam Robb, both in their teens, are best friends and athletic rivals. Twenty-eight years later, Tony is a successful San francisco attorney; sam is an assistant principal at Lake City High School. Sam has never left home, and Tony has never returned since the trauma that changed his life: the brutal murder of his first love, Alison, of which he was wrongly accused and which turned everyone, even Sam, against him. Now Sam is a suspect. One of his female students has been murdered. Tony, reluctantly but inevitably, comes back to defend him. At once, Tony is plunged into the unfinished business of his past. In the merciless arena of a murder trial, he must confront not only his fear that Sam is a murderer but also the buried truths that obscure the real meaning of Alison's death. Powerful in its portrayal of the complexities of male friendship, of the darkest recesses of love, and of the many ways in which the past stakes its claim upon the present, Silent Witness is that rare suspense novel which is far more – the kind of story we have come to expect from Richard North Patterson.
Richard North Patterson (in Berkeley, California) is an American fiction writer and political commentator. He is a 1971 graduate of the Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law, and a recipient of that University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Alumni and its President’s Award for Excellence. He has served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Ohio; a trial attorney for the Securities & Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C.; and was the SEC’s liaison to the Watergate Special Prosecutor. - Wikipedia
He has written more than 20 novels, with the most recent one, Eden In Winter (2014), marking his retirement as a novelist.
