If the Witness Lied Book

This young adult thriller takes place in twenty-four hours and explores how people as well as the media can exploit a situation with devastating results, especially when innocent children are involved.
 
 
Jack Fountain knows that what’s happened to his family sounds like the most horrible soap opera anyone could ever write. But it’s all true. It happened—to his parents; to his sisters, Smithy and Madison. And to his baby brother, Tris. What made it worse was that the media wanted to know every detail.
   Now it's almost Tris’s third birthday, and everything’s starting again. Aunt Cheryl, who’s living with the Fountain children, has decided that they will heal only if they work through their pain—on camera. It will be a field day for the media, and no one, except Cheryl, wants that. Jack and his sisters gear up to keep Tris’s adorable face off-screen, but they quickly realize that there is more at stake than their privacy. The very identities they’ve created for themselves are called into question. What really happened the day of their father’s accident?
   The Fountain siblings have less than twenty-four hours to change their fate. Together, they will ask questions no one asked at the time of the tragedy. And together, they vow that this time, they will not be exploited.

Publishers Weekly

Readers will be unable to put down Cooney's latest thriller. Jack, 15, lives with his two-year-old brother, Tris, and his aunt, while sisters Smithy and Madison are living elsewhere. Taking place on a single day, the novel switches between the viewpoints of the older family members and a teenage neighbor. Early hints point to Tris being a controversial figure, and it is gradually revealed that he is believed to be the cause of his parents' deaths (their mother delayed chemo to give birth to him). But as the day wears on and the siblings reunite, whether or not Tris inadvertently caused their father's death (the parking brake on his Jeep was released and it rolled over him) comes into question. Additionally, a religious undertone has several characters rethinking their relationship with God. Adding to the family's misery, their aunt has arranged for their lives to become a TV "docudrama," hosted by a man so sleazy he asks Smithy, "What was it like to realize your mother would rather die than bring you up?" Cooney masterfully ratchets up the tension in each scene and delivers fully in the exhilarating conclusion. Ages 12-up. (May)

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