The Bessie Blue Killer
-
- $4.99
-
- $4.99
Publisher Description
During World War II, due to a shortage of qualified pilots, Uncle Sam began a program of training thousands of military pilots. Among these were the Tuskegee Airmen, a unit of African-Americans eager to fly in combat. Fifty years later a Hollywood studio sets out to create a documentary about these brave airmen, featuring grizzled survivors of that long-ago era flying lovingly maintained vintage aircraft. And then...murder strikes on the movie set, and Hobart Lindsey, insurance investigator-turned-detective, enters the scene. Along with his sometime rival (and sometime love!), Marvia Plum, Lindsey plunges into a mystery with roots stretching half a century into the past. The third riveting entry in the Lindsay & Plum Detective Series!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The hook in this mystery-thriller is the full-bloom romance between white insurance adjuster Hobart Lindsey and black homicide detective Marvia Plum, who last teamed up in The Classic Car Killer . Lindsey's employer has written a $100-million policy covering a film company against any misadventure in the production of a film about the Tuskegee Airmen, the Air Force's all-black WW II flying corps. With Marvia's help, Lindsey probes the mysterious murder of a black janitor on location at the Oakland, Calif., airport at the start of filming. Lupoff concocts a fantastic chase scene with an armada of antique WW II planes pursuing a B-17 while the deranged pilot, who has Marvia's 9-year-old son on board, is coaxed into landing on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. Aside from such goofiness, the tale contains plenty of information about the Tuskegee Airmen and the ammunition dump catastrophe in Port Chicago, Calif., in July 1944, which killed 320, many of them black stevedores. Lupoff's deft handling of his characters' relationship is captured in Marvia's lines to her lover: ``You let me be black, but you don't make me be black . . .''
