Iron Prayer

Memphis. February 8, 2022. 2:47 a.m.

Captain Dyson Mills shoots a sleeping man through the windshield of a Honda Civic at the back of a Walmart parking lot on Elvis Presley Boulevard. The dead man is Jermaine Whitaker, twenty-three, an architecture student who was four months from his degree and engaged to a young nurse in Orange Mound named Erica Boudreaux. The shooting is ruled justified. The captain's rookie son, Russell, signs the report.

Two years later, Russell Mills walks toward a young Black woman on a lawn at Tom Lee Park with a clipboard in his hand. He has read her name on a registration sheet. He says hello. He courts her for nine months. He marries her. He breaks her.

When her grandmother lights a candle in a back room in Orange Mound, something walks back across that crosses what no candle should cross — and starts working its way through every officer who buried the truth, all the way up to the man with the badge who fired the shots.

IRON PRAYER is a horror novel about grief, complicity, and the thing a Black grandmother in the South will do when she runs out of better options. From the author of THE CATALOG MINDSET: WHY CONTENT IS THE NEW REAL ESTATE.

Iron goes where iron goes.