The Sound of Regret

The Sound of Regret is a legal thriller featuring prosecutor Colm Truesdale.

In Spartanburg, South Carolina, Assistant District Attorney Colm Truesdale is a gifted but combative trial lawyer rebuilding his life after devastating personal losses: the death of his infant daughter, Jaqi, and the apparent suicide of his wife, Ally. The novel opens on two fronts. In the prologue, young Detective Travis Hendricks arrives at Lake Saranac to find the body of Noah Johnson, a former high school classmate turned confidential informant, tortured and executed with the word "NARC" scrawled in blood above him. Meanwhile, Colm is in the middle of a murder trial, dismantling a defendant's self-defense claim. His best friend, Captain Rick "Bones" Denton, a veteran homicide detective, watches from the gallery alongside Mae Jennings, Colm's former sister-in-law and a forensic psychiatrist. Their conversation reveals that Colm has clawed his way back from a period of heavy drinking and hospitalization, and that courtroom work is the only therapy he will accept.

Bones soon learns that Noah was murdered while serving as a federal informant on a narcotics task force. The killing was ordered by Beau Landry, a local drug lord who operates behind the façade of a legitimate businessman, and carried out by his enforcer, Jean Boucher, a tall man with one pale blue eye and one opaque gray eye. Boucher tortured Noah and cut out part of his tongue as a warning to anyone who cooperates with law enforcement. Beau's operation faces mounting pressure from cash flow problems and an imminent cocaine shipment from Atlanta.

Running parallel to the drug investigation is a more personal threat. JD, the common-law wife of imprisoned sex offender Larry Stafford, orchestrates an elaborate revenge campaign from a rural trailer with Larry's half-brother, Knox Vick. She and Knox have already murdered defense attorney Frank Hastings, staging his death to look like a suicide using a gun they stole from Colm's home, and coerced Hastings's receptionist, Charlotte Abbott, into telling police that Colm threatened Hastings before his death. JD also forced a therapist named Tabitha McJenkins to write a fabricated report claiming the child victim in Larry's case recanted her allegations, then killed Tabitha via insulin overdose to silence her. JD is cunning and violent, skilled at crafting disguises, and driven by obsessive hatred of Colm.

Meanwhile, Colm gives Belle Atkins, a former waitress he and Bones befriended and quietly helped through law school, his late wife's Mini Cooper. An envelope falls from the visor containing tickets to Colm's favorite musical, Les Misérables, revealing that Ally was making future plans even as she apparently took her own life and deepening the mystery surrounding her death. While cleaning the car, Belle discovers a GPS tracker hidden in the rear bumper, raising further questions.

Colm faces threats from multiple directions. When police stop a car carrying ten kilos of cocaine, the passenger turns out to be Micah, Belle's younger brother, who had no knowledge of the drugs. Colm negotiates to protect Micah and convinces the driver, James "Cool" Dawkins, to cooperate as a new confidential informant by completing the delivery under surveillance. The controlled delivery fails when no buyer appears, leaving Cool exposed. Boucher, disguised as a street preacher named Jericho, befriends Cool over several visits, gains his trust, and executes him during a prayer session. A Post-it note left on Cool's forehead reads "NICE TRY, COLM." Colm visits Cool's grieving mother, Nia Dawkins, who tells him she trusted him and he let her son down. Sitting alone in his car afterward, Colm hears only his own heavy heartbeat: the sound of regret.

Bones discovers that the ammunition used to kill Frank Hastings matches an obscure Italian brand he gave Colm years ago along with a .38 revolver. Colm insists he has no memory of calling Hastings and no motive for killing him, attributing his memory gaps to heavy drinking during his darkest period. He also realizes that Frank was Larry Stafford's defense attorney, connecting the frame-up directly to the Stafford case. Before a search warrant can be served, Bones stages a fake burglary at Colm's home, removing the empty holster and matching ammunition to keep them out of police hands.

JD escalates her campaign. Disguised as a grieving mother, she infiltrates Mae's psychiatric practice to gather intelligence on Colm's vulnerabilities. She coerces an undocumented cleaning woman to plant the fabricated therapist's report inside Larry Stafford's evidence box in the sheriff's evidence room, then enters Colm's house and plants a copy under the mattress in Jaqi's crib. When deputies execute a search warrant, they find the planted report, and Sheriff Lloyd Fuller declares it could end Colm's career.

At the post-conviction relief hearing, a legal proceeding in which a convicted prisoner seeks a new trial, Colm's situation appears dire. The Attorney General's attorney essentially concedes prosecutorial misconduct without mounting a defense. JD, disguised as a courthouse bailiff after kidnapping the real one, watches from inside the courtroom. When Colm reads the full report, he discovers a hidden message: The first letter of each paragraph spells out "HELP ME COLM," an acrostic embedded by Tabitha as a cry for help. Judge Sienna Kennedy finds the probability of coincidence negligible and orders the hearing continued until the original child victim can be brought from Oklahoma to testify. JD, rattled but resourceful, realizes the hearing has revealed her daughter Amelia's general location.

The drug investigation reaches its climax when a fingerprint found in the Bible at Cool's crime scene matches Gene Desjairlais, a convicted murderer who supposedly died in Louisiana's Angola Prison 18 years earlier. Colm and Bones piece together that Desjairlais escaped by killing his near-identical cousin during a staged prison riot, deliberately disfiguring his own eye to match his cousin's appearance, and walking out under the dead man's name before reinventing himself as Jean Boucher. When a SWAT team moves to arrest Boucher, he flees and opens fire, shooting Travis in the chest; Travis's vest stops the bullet but cracks a rib. Bones rams Boucher's car and strikes him, killing him. Beau Landry flees to a mountain house in North Carolina but is shot by an unseen assassin before he can be arrested.

After Knox drowns during a violent confrontation with Bones at Lake Jocassee, JD burns the trailer to destroy evidence and drives to Oklahoma under a new alias, hunting for her daughter.

In the aftermath, Colm and Bones take stock: Boucher killed both Noah and Cool but is now dead, denying the victims' families their day in court. Knox is the prime suspect in the murders of Frank Hastings and Tabitha McJenkins, whose death has been reclassified as homicide. The woman behind the conspiracy remains at large. District Attorney Cindy Porter tells Colm that the state Attorney General wants fresh eyes on old cases involving Arthur Franklin, a man accused of abducting young women who died in jail before trial. These are the same cases Belle has been investigating through the Innocence Project, a law school program in which students examine possible wrongful convictions. In the final scene, Belle is summoned to the dean's office, where the door opens and Colm walks in: "Hello, Belle. Let's see if we can catch a killer of women" (242). The ending sets up a continuation of both the Franklin investigation and the unresolved threat of JD.