Ellen McGarrahan was a young journalist in 1990 when she watched the botched execution of Jesse Tafero – flames and smoke and three jolts of the electric chair. When stories began to circulate that another man had committed the murders Tafero was condemned for, McGarrahan found herself haunted by his fiery death, and by the question of whether she had witnessed the execution of an innocent man.

Decades later, McGarrahan is now a private investigator at the top of her profession, but she has not been able to resolve this murder mystery at the center of her own life. To find peace, she must investigate the Tafero case herself. Her quest plunges her back to the Miami of the 1970s, an unsettling world of cat burglars, cocaine kingpins – and blood. But the tragedy of two murdered police officers is only the start of the story, and Florida becomes the jumping off point for a search that will take her not only to the other side of the world but also into a long-buried secret in her own life. A rare and vivid account of the work of a private investigator, Two Truths and a Lie is ultimately a personal and profound meditation on truth, violence, complicity, and justice.