Hanging Lies

In a word, Legacy Ridge is paradise. An exclusive master planned community located at the crossroads of the fictitious town of Hattesboro, North Carolina and the bottom of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it is a gated Eden that is home to an assembly of newly minted millionaires and one the most magnificent golf courses ever built. Yet something is rotten in this private preserve of the retired rich.

Clayton Palmer Bennett is an unscrupulous lawyer who has constructed the entire community upon a foundation of deceit. As the trusted consultant to a West Coast microchip manufacturer who has diversified into land development, Bennett pieced together the parcel upon which Legacy Ridge has risen through a series of underhanded real estate deals.

Pete Strickland is the disillusioned and dissolute Head Professional who, at midlife, has clearly squandered his considerable gifts for the game of golf. With a past forever intertwined with Clay Bennett, his present responsibilities consist of teaching the game to the club’s hapless members, padding their billing statements and marauding his way through the handsome ladies of the neighborhood. It is a corrupt but comfortable existence.

Enter Billy Prentice, a brilliant young golfer who accepts a position as an assistant in the Pro Shop. In the course of a single summer, Billy comes of age as a player and a man; helps the wayward Pete Strickland find redemption; and pries loose the manipulative grip that Bennett has on both his beautiful and talented daughter and the community that he controls.

The novel is a humorous satire of the gilded lives of the country club set. Moving between past and present, the story explores how interwoven fates can shape unexpected futures and ill-considered choices can have a lifetime of consequences.

While much of the action centers around golf, the message is universal. It uses the strict honor code of the game as a stark counterpoint to contemporary values. In the end, HANGING LIES is an old fashioned morality play in which good triumphs over evil; truth and honesty are fairly rewarded; and love, eventually, conquers all.