However, to meet bail stipulations, she volunteers as Katie's guardian (since Kate's strict parents reject her) and moves in with the Fishers. Ellie, who has retreated to Leda's farm in Paradise to reconsider her life-she successfully defends guilty clients-embarks on the case reluctantly: at 39, she wants nothing more than to have a child. Katie Fisher, 18, denies not only having committed the murder but even having borne the baby, whose body is found in the Fishers' calving pen, and she sticks to her story, even when she is quizzed by Ellie Hathaway, the high-powered Philadelphia attorney who undertakes Katie's defense as a favor to Leda, an aunt she and the young woman share. Though it begins as the quietly electrifying story of an unmarried Amish teenager who gives birth to a baby she is accused of then smothering, Picoult's latest (after Keeping Faith) settles into an ordinary trial epic, albeit one centered intriguingly on an Amish dairy farm near Lancaster, Pa. And as she unravels a tangled murder case, Ellie also looks deep within-to confront her own fears and desires when a man from her past reenters her life. Delving deep inside the world of those who live 'plain,' Ellie must find a way to reach Katie on her terms. When Ellie Hathaway, a disillusioned big-city attorney, comes to Paradise, Pennsylvania, to defend Katie, two cultures collide-and for the first time in her high-profile career, Ellie faces a system of justice very different from her own. But the police investigation leads to a more shocking disclosure: circumstantial evidence suggests that eighteen-year-old Katie Fisher, an unmarried Amish woman believed to be the newborn's mother, took the child's life.

The discovery of a dead infant in an Amish barn shakes Lancaster County to its core. From the bestselling author of My Sister's Keeper comes the riveting story of a murder that shatters the picturesque calm of Amish country-and tests the heart and soul of the lawyer defending the woman at the center of the storm.

The plain truth book