Description
Book Synopsis''A brilliant blending of crime, mystery, and American history. Terrific entertainment''
Stephen King on Darktown
Lightning Men follows the multi-award-nominated, highly acclaimed crime debut Darktown into a city on the brink of huge and violent change - and full of secrets.
Atlanta, 1950. Crime divides, the fight unites.
Officer Denny Rakestraw and ''Negro Officers'' Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith face the Klan, gangs and family warfare in a rapidly changing Atlanta.
Black families - including Smith''s sister and brother-in-law - are moving into Rake''s formerly all-white neighbourhood, leading his brother-in-law, a proud Klansman, to launch a scheme to ''save'' their streets. When those efforts leave a man dead, Rake is forced to choose between loyalty to family or the law.
Meanwhile, Boggs has outraged his preacher father by courting a domestic, whose dangerous ex-boyfriend is then re
Trade Review
Mullen blends the classic ingredients of det-fic noir with a well-researched and searing portrayal of pre-civil rights racial division. Magnificent and shocking - Sunday Times
One incendiary image ignites the next in this highly combustible procedural, set in the city's rigidly segregated black neighborhoods during the pre-civil-rights era and
written with a ferocious passion that'll knock the wind out of you. - New York Times
A terrific story that raises issues that have not vanished. - The Times
From the very first page of
Darktown,
I was stunned, mesmerized, and instantly a huge fan of Tom Mullen. Beyond the history and the thrilling mystery, the book's soul lies in the burgeoning partnership (and dare I say friendship) at the center of the book. It's a reminder of the ties that cut across race in America. There is nothing I love more in a book than hope. - Attica Locke, author of Black Water Rising
Fine Southern storytelling meets hard-boiled crime in a tale that connects an overlooked chapter of history to our own continuing struggles with race today - Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain
