"The Semblance of Truth" tells the story of Connally Daulton, a newspaper editor thrust into an investigation of the rape and murder of a young school teacher and a black youth burned alive for the crime 30 years before.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld’s maxim that says the semblance of truth does more evil in the world than the truth does provided the title and theme.

The setting is 1969 in a small town in a part of Missouri still known as Little Dixie. The story plays against a backdrop of the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the ascendency of Richard M. Nixon.