April 2016 BOTM

[Cobwebs-Iced-Across-SpaceTime]

Join us on April 2 to discuss Between Black and White, the second legal thriller by Robert Bailey, sequel to The Professor.

[Cobwebs-Iced-Across-SpaceTime]

GR synopsis: "In 1966 in Pulaski, Tennessee, Bocephus Haynes watched in horror as his father was brutally murdered by ten local members of the Ku Klux Klan. As an African American lawyer practicing in the birthplace of the Klan years later, Bo has spent his life pursuing justice in his father’s name. But when Andy Walton, the man believed to have led the lynch mob forty-five years earlier, ends up murdered in the same spot as Bo’s father, Bo becomes the prime suspect.

Retired law professor Tom McMurtrie, Bo’s former teacher and friend, is a year removed from returning to the courtroom. Now McMurtrie and his headstrong partner, Rick Drake, must defend Bo on charges of capital murder while hunting for Andy Walton’s true killer. In a courtroom clash that will put their reputations and lives at stake, can McMurtrie and Drake release Bo from a lifetime of despair? Or will justice remain hidden somewhere between black and white?"

Pulaski, Tennessee: Birthplace of the KKK. I know already this novel is going to hit me hard. I've lived in the Deep South off and on since 1974, I've lived twice in Upper East Tennessee; and in a town about 30 miles from here, where i lived in 3 different locales around it, several lynchings occurred, including a farmhand ex-con lynched after a farm wife's murder, and a woman. Women have also been lynched in Pulaski (TN and KY). Supposedly, the husband of one of my close ancestors was a high-and-mighty in the Midwest KKK in the 1930's. The South has no monopoly.

[Cobwebs-Iced-Across-SpaceTime]

So far--not a problem. If this had been authored by Joe R. Lansdale instead of Robert Bailey, and set in 1930's East Texas instead of 1968 Pulaski Tennessee, I'd have already thrown the book (or Kindle) and prepared to have a breakdown. Funny how I can devour Edward Lee, Bryan D. Smith, and Matt Shaw, but I cannot read a lynch scene.

Pitiful.

The Bottoms and Edge of Dark Water