William Reston Hunt is the pseudonym of a retired trust officer and attorney originally from Tennessee who now resides in Greenville County, South Carolina. Following a few years in the private practice of law, he spent 35 years in the trust business working for four financial institutions—a bank trust department and a trust company in Nashville, and two bank trust departments in Knoxville. The administration of estates was a major part of his duties during most of his trust career.
PERSONAL TRU$T is his first novel.
Story Background
The decision to write a fictional novel was made sometime in the late 1990s while I was working in the trust department of a bank in Tennessee. My writing began in 2000 when I decided to tell a story inspired by the death by hypothermia of a person during the blizzard of March, 1993, when 60 inches of snow fell on Mt. LeConte in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Through my prior employment at another bank’s trust department, I had served as the administrator of this person’s estate account.
Creative writing is hard and the times were numerous when I questioned my ability to write a novel that would meet my expectations. At some point in 2003 or so I set aside my partially completed manuscript with the intent to one day soon renew my writing. But weeks became months and months became years, and my creative juices did not begin flowing again until my retirement from a Nashville, Tennessee, trust company at the end of 2019.
In March, 2020, Covid-19 was declared to be a global pandemic. With more time on my hands by staying home most of the time, I finished the manuscript in mid-2021 although another round of editing later resulted in several minor revisions.
Being a work of fiction, this book contains characters and events created out of whole cloth. Any similarity to actual persons, dead or alive, or to events is unintended and purely coincidental. With few exceptions, places, too, are fictional. For example, there is no Franklin, South Carolina.
I hope you will enjoy reading my story.
William Reston Hunt
Greenville County, South Carolina