Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION PAR | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
In what can be described as a modern-day In the Heat of the Night, P.J. Parrish's debut novel delivers chilling suspense, knife-edge tension, and the compelling story of a cop confronting his own biracial identity in Black Pool, Mississippi.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The ghosts of a small town's bigoted past are tangible presences in this tense but predictable crime drama set in racially divided rural Mississippi. Mulatto police investigator Louis Kincaid is newly relocated from Detroit to the sleepy burg of Black Pool when a local field yields a gruesome discovery: the remains of a young black man lynched 20 years ago. Louis attempts to establish the man's identity and the motive for his killing but meets stiff resistance from diplomatic good-old-boy sheriff Sam Dodie and shifty local politicos who consider the past "over, totally irrelevant, and certainly not worth digging up." The two crime-scene clues Louis has to work withÄa moldering book of poetry and a medallion linked to the antebellum white aristocracyÄare soon compounded by the suspicious deaths of several town elders, which suggest the desperate attempt of someone, possibly the mayor or the district attorney, to keep the town's dark and dirty history secret. Louis, who is cut from the same stylish cloth as John Ball's Virgil Tibbs, is an absorbing character, unable to detach emotionally from his investigation and unwilling to accommodate Black Pool's arrogant attitudes toward blacks. His supporting cast, which includes an abundance of oafish white-trash cops and sympathetic Southern belles who introduce hints of taboo interracial sex, are too familiar and give the novel too many points of correspondence with In the Heat of the Night and similar racial ly charged crime thrillers. Parrish's debut is promising, but Louis Kincaid deserves future adventures that are more challenging and original. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
An overwrought debut thriller set in the not-quite-ready-to-be-new South. It's 1983. To Black Pool, Mississippi, returns native Lewis Kincaid, drawn there by a dying mother. Not that he likes her much'she's a drunk, plus she deserted him'but Lewis is never one to shirk his duty. She's black, Lewis's equally no-account father was white, and Lewis can think of a dozen places he'd rather be than in a town where biracial means second class at best. There's Detroit, for instance, where he enjoyed the beginnings of a nice career in law. Now, however, to help pay the bills while he keeps his deathwatch, Lewis hires on as a deputy to Sheriff Dodie. It's a chance gig, which is to say it happens by telephone: Dodie, worn, weary, and a little dim, hires Lewis under the impression that he's white. Still, Dodie'that seeming redneck'has other sides to him. When the skeleton of a teenaged young black boy, victim of a 30-year-old lynching, is discovered, Dodie permits Lewis to investigate. It's permission granted reluctantly, of course. ``Things like that are part of the past,'' Dodie says. Not to be dissuaded, Lewis starts to dig, an activity that rouses almost as little enthusiasm among the town's blacks as it does among its whites. Unwelcome, unpopular Lewis gets beaten, shot, and nearly lynched himself. But indomitable amalgam of super- and soaper-hero that he is, he takes on all comers, resists all temptation (an adorable white girl throws herself at him harder than a Nolan Ryan fastball), and leaves Black Pool a degree more enlightened than when he arrived. Clumsy prose, stereotyped people'and a first novelist who has to learn that in plotting the twist is better than the wrench.
Booklist Review
Mixed-raced loner Louis Kincaid returns to Black Pool, the small Mississippi town he left years before, to await his estranged mother's death. His law enforcement background helps him secure a temporary job with the town police, but simmering racism in the department and in the community becomes quickly apparent as he begins peeling back the layers of a decades-old crime--the lynching of a young African American man--and attracts the attention of the daughter of one of the town's leading white citizens. Parrish vividly creates a divided community with a violent secret and a determined investigator whose shaky self-concept and inability to trust contribute nearly as much to his difficulties in solving the case as the vicious bigotry and arrogance he encounters. With plenty of action, this is guaranteed to keep readers entertained. --Stephanie Zvirin
