Author Description

“This is exquisite storytelling, a real page-turner, spun in the Southern literary tradition of the great Ernest Gaines.” – Nathan McCall, author of Makes Me Wanna Holler and Them: A Novel The year is 1980. Atlanta is in the grips of a cunning serial killer preying on black children. Tension ratchets up when a popular civil rights leader, Reverend Jimmy Lee Hightower, is killed. Detective Cleveland Mock, recently booted from the Missing and Murdered Children's task force, is spiraling downward: Talking to his dead wife, isolated from his fellow cops, eager to get back on the task force. Instead, he gets the Hightower murder -- and intense political pressure to make a quick arrest and restore calm. His investigation takes him to Hightower's hometown in rural Georgia. There, he joins forces with Sheriff Ed Meaney, who has his own agenda, and with Mama Kalie, a mysterious psychic who had predicted Hightower's murder decades earlier. As Mock races against the clock to find a murderer, he uncovers a viper's nest of long-buried secrets that someone will kill and kill again to keep buried.