When former Palm Beach State Attorney Michael McAuliffe set out to write a novel about racism, police brutality and the criminal justice system, he hoped it could trigger important conversations among attorneys and law students.

As it happens, that's precisely what shot to the forefront of the nation's consciousness just weeks after the book published, when streets filled with protesters outraged that George Floyd, a black man, was killed under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis.

A former prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida and at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., McAuliffe based "No Truth Left to Tell," published in March, loosely on his own experiences. It spotlights a southern town in the 1990s, where federal investigators arrive to investigate members of the Ku Klux Klan over their attempts to ignite a race war with a wave of hate crimes.