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Summary
Summary
As racial tensions mount during the 1969 celebrity trial of the Chicago Eight, African American PI Smokey Dalton is keeping a low profile with his son, Jimmy, who knows a dark secret about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. When Smokey finds a group of skeletons hidden in the wall of a building hes inspecting for investor Lara Hathaway, his investigation leads him into Chicagos racist past and implicates some of the nations most powerful people in a deadly 1919 riot.
Author Notes
Kris Nelscott lives on the Oregon coast. The first Smokey Dalton novel, A Dangerous Road , won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery and was shortlisted for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; the second, Smoke-Filled Rooms , was a PNBA Book Award Finalist; the third, Thin Walls , was one of the Chicago Tribune 's best mysteries of the year; the fourth, Stone Cribs , was honored by the Wisconsin Library Association as one of the best books of 2005, and it and the fifth, War at Home , were both shortlisted for the Oregon Book Award. Visit her Web site at www.kristinekathrynrusch.com.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in 1969 during the trial of the Chicago Eight, Edgar-finalist Nelscott's sixth Smoky Dalton novel (after 2005's War at Home) deftly interweaves the issue of race with politics, societal questions and personal relationships, like Smokey's on-again, off-again romance with Laura Hathaway, a white businesswoman. Laura asks Smokey to investigate an empty Queen Anne house that had been bought by her dishonest father's company years earlier. The house, separated into apartments, has slowly emptied over the years until there's only one resident, the manager, Mortimer Hanley. Hanley's death leads to Smokey's inspection, which in turn brings a horrific discovery: the basement is bricked up into many rooms, and each room holds dead bodies. Laura and Smokey bring in Wayne LeDoux, a persnickety criminologist, to do forensic work at the house, and Tim Minton, an expert from a local funeral home, joins him. The two men form a special bond, and like the bond between Smokey and his adopted son, make a suspenseful mystery into something much richer. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In her compelling Smokey Dalton series, Nelscott continues to probe the human drama and complex emotion beneath the headlines of the racially tense 1960s. Dalton, an African American private investigator on Chicago's South Side, lives with secret knowledge of the Martin Luther King Jr., assassination--knowledge that threatens his life and that of his foster son, Jimmy. That frame story adds frisson to the series, but this time the King thread moves to the background. We pick up the action in the fall of 1969, with the Chicago Eight trial in process. But Dalton's focus--prompted by his discovery of human skeletons in an abandoned building--is on the distant past, 1919, the year of a deadly race riot in Chicago. Jumping between the present--the novel concludes with the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton--and the depressingly similar racial climate at the time of the 1919 riot, Nelscott builds suspense effectively while making the reader feel the historical burden of racial hatred. After five novels all set between spring 1968 and fall 1969, this series was beginning to seem almost frozen in its historical moment, but this time, Nelscott, by widening the time frame, allows us to see the events of the '60s--and their devastating effects on individual human lives--from a wider (if hardly comforting) perspective. --Bill Ott Copyright 2006 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Racial butchery in Chicago, 1919-68. While freelancing as a building inspector for his lady friend Laura Hathaway, CEO of Sturdy Investments (War at Home, 2005, etc.), private eye Smokey Dalton makes a grisly discovery. Three bodies have been bricked up in the basement, perhaps immured years ago by Laura's father, who took possession of the building in the '40s and enlisted Mortimer Hanley to manage it. Working with forensics expert LeDoux and autopsy specialist Minton, Smokey unbricks more bodies and some clues dating back to 1919 when the area, known as the Levee, was rife with gambling, prostitution, racial warfare over jobs, and cops used to dumping black troublemakers wherever they pleased. It's not so different from the '50s and '60s, when the police covered up the murder of Emmett Till and provoked violent confrontations with radical Weathermen, and Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, tried to guilt Smokey into activism. Tracing racism from generation to generation, Smokey and his unofficial son Jimmy, who fled Memphis after Martin Luther King's assassination, are catapulted into corruption that spreads from the police station to the courthouse. Nelscott reconstructs an unlovely Chicago past that leads directly to the havoc of the Conspiracy trial, the death of Fred Hampton and the racial unrest of the '60s. As an explanation of whoring, thieving and terminating with extreme prejudice, this is as good as it gets. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
African American P.I. Smokey Dalton is back, trying to stay cool during the 1969 trial of the Chicago Eight. Then he uncovers skeletons in the wall of a building he is inspecting and ends up investigating a case with roots in Chicago's racist past. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One I parked the police car in the trees, along the dirt access road. I shut off the headlights and let out a small breath. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness. A few blocks away, I could hear the rumble and clangs from the Ford Motor Plant. The air smelled of rotten eggs and sewage, the stink so thick it made my eyes water. My heart was pounding. I had to force myself to take deep, even breaths despite the smell. For five long minutes, I sat in the car, staring out the windows, checking the rearview, hoping no one followed me. When it became clear that no one had, I got out, closing the door carefully so that it didn't slam. I could see my breath. My back ached, and blood still trickled down the side of my face. I swiped at it with my arm, staining the sleeve of my coat. At least I had the presence of mind to bring my gloves. I walked down the dirt road to the construction site. Spindly trees rose up around me, their leaves scattered on the road. The noise from the Ford Plant covered the crunch of my feet along the path. Equipment sat along the edge of the canal, ghostly shapes against the darkness. I stopped short of the edge. They had finished dredging this section last year when someone had deemed the canal deep enough. The water glinted, black and filthy, its depth impossible to see. Some lights from the nearby industrial plants reflected thinly on the water's surface, revealing a gasoline slick and bits of wadded up paper. I let out a small breath, hating this moment, seeing no other choice. Then I went back to the cop car. I pushed on the trunk, making sure the latch held. Then I opened the back passenger door, rolled down the window, and went to the front passenger door, doing the same. I saved the driver's window for last. I crawled back inside the car just as the radio crackled, startling me. The thin voice coming across the static talked about a fight at the Kinetic Playground, which had nothing to do with me. Still, my heart pounded harder. I started the car. It rumbled to life, the powerful engine ready to go. I was shaking. I kept the car in park, then I pushed the emergency brake. I reached across the seat and picked up my gloves and the blood-covered nightstick. I released the emergency brake, got out of the car, and leaned inside the door. Carefully, I wedged the nightstick against the accelerator, making sure that thing flattened against the floor. The car's engine revved, echoing in that grove of too-thin trees. I braced my left hand on the car seat, grabbed the automatic gearshift, and shoved the car into drive. Then I leapt back, sprawling in the cold dirt as the car zoomed down the road. The car disappeared over the bank, and I braced myself for a crash of metal against concrete---a crash that meant I had failed. A half-second later, I heard a large splash. I ran to the edge of the road and stared down the embankment. The car tipped, front end already lost to the canal. The brackish water flowed into the open windows, sinking it even faster. The trunk went under last, disappearing in a riot of bubbles. I could almost imagine it popping open at the last moment, the bodies emerging, floating along the surface like the gasoline slick, revealing themselves much too soon. But the bubbles eventually stopped, and the car vanished into the canal's depths. I took off the bloody gloves and tossed them on top of the filthy water. No one would connect them to the car. No one would ever know. Except me. Copyright (c) 2006 by White Mist Mountain, Inc. Excerpted from Days of Rage by Kris Nelscott All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
