Darktown
The remarkable, multi-award nominated historical crime thriller
-
-
5.0 • 6 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
'A brilliant blending of crime, mystery, and American history. Terrific entertainment'
Stephen King
Darktown is a relentlessly gripping, highly intelligent crime novel set in Atlanta in 1948, following the city's first black police force investigating a brutal murder against all the odds.
'Crime fiction that melds an intense plot with fully realized characters'
Daily Mail
Atlanta, 1948. In this city, all crime is black and white.
On one side of the tracks are the rich, white neighbourhoods; on the other, Darktown, the African-American area guarded by the city's first black police force of only eight men. These cops are kept near-powerless by the authorities: they can't arrest white suspects; they can't drive a squad car; they must operate out of a dingy basement.
When a poor black woman is killed in Darktown having been last seen in a car with a rich white man, no one seems to care except for Boggs and Smith, two black cops from vastly different backgrounds. Pressured from all sides, they will risk their jobs, the trust of their community and even their own lives to investigate her death.
Their efforts bring them up against a brutal old-school cop, Dunlow, who has long run Darktown as his own turf - but Dunlow's idealistic young partner, Rakestraw, is a young progressive who may be willing to make allies across colour lines . . .
Soon to be a major TV series from Jamie Foxx and Sony Pictures Television.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mullen (The Revisionists) uses the lens of a twisted murder mystery to unsettle readers with his unflinching look at racism in post-WWII Atlanta. That city has just hired its first black police officers, but the eight men given the responsibility for guarding black neighborhoods are still relegated to second-class status. For example, they're barred from wearing their police uniforms when traveling to and from court to testify. One of those officers, Lucius Boggs, ends up being responsible for a sensitive murder investigation after Brian Underhill, a drunken white man, drives his car into a lamppost in a black neighborhood. Underhill was released without charge by the white officers who showed up at the scene, but Lily Ellsworth, the black woman who was his passenger, is found dead later on, abandoned in an alley like a piece of trash. Underhill's status as a former cop and the low value placed on black lives make the probe into Lily's death a perilous one, for both Boggs and a white officer who's uneasy with his department's violent racism. This page-turner reads like the best of James Ellroy.
Customer Reviews
Great crime novel
Fantastic, fast-paced and set in an intersting period when racism ran rife in the South. Terrific read