Lightning Men
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4.0 • 6 Ratings
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
'A brilliant blending of crime, mystery, and American history. Terrific entertainment'
Stephen King on Darktown
Lightning Men follows the multi-award-nominated, highly acclaimed crime debut Darktown into a city on the brink of huge and violent change - and full of secrets.
Atlanta, 1950. Crime divides, the fight unites.
Officer Denny Rakestraw and 'Negro Officers' Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith face the Klan, gangs and family warfare in a rapidly changing Atlanta.
Black families - including Smith's sister and brother-in-law - are moving into Rake's formerly all-white neighbourhood, leading his brother-in-law, a proud Klansman, to launch a scheme to 'save' their streets. When those efforts leave a man dead, Rake is forced to choose between loyalty to family or the law.
Meanwhile, Boggs has outraged his preacher father by courting a domestic, whose dangerous ex-boyfriend is then released from prison. As Boggs, Smith, and their all-black precinct contend with violent drug dealers fighting for turf in new territory, their personal dramas draw them closer to the fires that threaten to consume Atlanta once again.
Praise for Thomas Mullen
'Magnificent and shocking'
Sunday Times
'Written with a ferocious passion that'll knock the wind out of you'
New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1950, Mullen's outstanding sequel to 2016's Darktown showcases the difficulties of effectively policing the mean streets of Atlanta when some cops belong to the Ku Klux Klan. Denny Rakestraw, who's not a Klan member, is distrusted by his fellow officers for his suspected role in the disappearance of his former partner. Denny's problems increase when his Klansman brother-in-law, Dale Simpkins, gets involved in a plot to stop the influx of African-Americans into his neighborhood. The personal and the professional also intersect for Lucius Boggs, one of the city's first black officers. They are not only not allowed to arrest whites but are "barely even supposed to interact with white people," which proves troublesome when Lucius and another black cop, Tommy Smith, start to investigate a moonshine smuggling ring that turns out to include some white men. Meanwhile, the release from prison of the father of Lucius's fianc e's child creates personal complications for Lucius. Mullen again brilliantly combines a suspenseful plot with a searing look at a racist South.
