Days of Rage

✍ Scribed by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Kris Nelscott

• Book ID: 108157964
• Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 183 KB
• Series: Smokey Dalton 6
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

It's 1969 and the city of Chicago is in turmoil. The celebrity trial of the Chicago Eight---charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention---has begun. Protests abound over the trial and the conflict has caught the attention of everyone from the Black Panthers to city gangs to local trade unions.

Meanwhile, African-American P.I. Smokey Dalton and his adopted son, Jimmy, are keeping a low profile. They've been on the run from their native Memphis since Jimmy witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., but have slowly settled into a steady life in Chicago. Smokey continues to accept cases and to inspect property for Sturdy Investments, the real-estate company owned by Laura Hathaway, his on-again, off-again girlfriend.

But the delicate balance in Smokey's daily life is threatened when he makes a horrible discovery in a house he's inspecting. Does what they've found have any connection to Laura's business, and her father, who used to run it? Is it evidence of a long-ago killer, and if so, how has it remained buried for so long? Or is it something that could threaten Smokey---and Jimmy, and Laura---today? Smokey must answer all these questions before the truth about what he's found is discovered by someone willing to kill to keep it secret, while the violent chaos surrounding "the trial of the century" whirls around them.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred 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.)
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Starred 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 American Library Association. All rights reserved

Version : 5.0