I
never lived in the South, but both my parents migrated from Alabama to Chicago
in the first half of the twentieth century. I'm an historian whose
first professional work was as a journalist, so Time's Undoing hit me in all
the tenderest places.
This moving work of historical fiction captured my heart
and imagination with a series of deft snapshots that pinged between present-day
Birmingham, Alabama and a dark chapter in the city's early twentieth-century
past. Cheryl Head mines her own family history to deliver a searing account of
unsolved murder and racial injustice. The contemporary thread of this novel
follows a young journalist's attempt to uncover and right those buried wrongs.
A searing and tender novel about a young Black journalist’s search for answers in the unsolved murder of her great-grandfather in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, decades ago—inspired by the author’s own family history
Birmingham, 1929: Robert Lee Harrington, a master carpenter, has just moved to Alabama to pursue a job opportunity, bringing along his pregnant wife and young daughter. Birmingham is in its heyday, known as the “Magic City” for its booming steel industry, and while Robert and his family find much to enjoy in the city’s busy markets and vibrant nightlife, it’s also a stronghold for the Klan. And with…
New
Orleans is a favorite city of mine, for its clammy claustrophobic parishes as
much as its rollicking good times and extraordinary food. Scorched Grace
delivers richly textured excursions into the heat and bent psyche of New
Orleans, in a story led by Sister Holiday, a tattooed lesbian nun with grunge
rocker vibes.
This exciting twist on noir and amateur sleuth tropes was fun,
harrowing, heart-opening, and satisfying.
Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun, puts her amateur sleuthing skills to the test in this "unique and confident" debut crime novel (Gillian Flynn).
When Saint Sebastian's School becomes the target of a shocking arson spree, the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and their surrounding New Orleans community are thrust into chaos.
Patience is a virtue, but punk rocker turned nun Sister Holiday isn't satisfied to just wait around for officials to return her home and sanctuary to its former peace, instead deciding to unveil the mysterious attacker herself. Her investigation leads her down a twisty path of…
This
historical novel pulses with empathy, humanely portrayed growth, and quiet
unease, a combination which speaks to the social justice warrior and history
fan in me.
I loved the book's exquisite exploration of 1940s Los Angeles and
the collision of cultures as displaced Japanese-American citizens returned from
internment camps to their old neighborhoods after the end of World War II. A
young wife's tentative search for a shadowy murderer drives this mystery, which
is a stunning sequel to Hirahara's acclaimed novel, Clark and Division.
A Japanese American nurse's aide navigates the dangers of post-WWII and post-Manzanar life as she attempts to find justice for a broken family in this follow-up to the Mary Higgins Clark Award–winning Clark and Division.
It’s been two years since Aki Ito and her family were released from Manzanar detention center and resettled in Chicago with other Japanese Americans. Now the Itos have finally been allowed to return home to California—but nothing is as they left it. The entire Japanese American community is starting from scratch, with thousands of people living in dismal refugee camps while they struggle to find…
Vandy Myrick became a cop to fulfill her father's expectations. After her world cratered, she became a private investigator to satisfy her own hopes. Now she's back in Queenstown, New Jersey, her childhood home, in search of solace and recovery. As a Black woman, Vandy finds privacy is hard to come by in "Q-town," but worth striving for.
To keep the cash flowing, Vandy handles plenty of divorce cases. When the mayor's nephew, Leo Hannah, hires her, the new surveillance job seems routine. But Vandy soon realizes there's trouble beneath the surface when a racially charged murder with connections to the Hannah family rocks the town. Fingers point. Clients appear. Opposition to the inquiry hardens. Vandy's a minor league PI with few friends and no resources. But she has grit and determination few possess. She'll stop at nothing to solve this case. The New York Times reviewer wrote, “Trouble in Queenstown starts at a simmer, but when Vandy’s investigation gets going, it reaches a full boil.”
