Setting and characterization overshadow the mystery in Carter's (Walking Bones) entertaining if conventional whodunit, the first in a new series. In the days following the domestic unrest triggered by Martin Luther King's assassination in April 1968, Cassandra, an English major at a small Chicago college, finds her life disrupted by more than political turmoil. Cassandra joins her great-uncle and great-aunt, the people who reared her, in helping a neighbor locate his teenage granddaughter, last seen entering what may have been a police car. The missing girl's checkered past, including service in a brothel, may hold the key, but other clues point to a local branch of the Black Panthers as well as to the vicious sex murder of a white teacher nearly a decade before. While some crime fans won't go for the minimal detection and a solution literally handed to Cassandra and her relatives in a letter, other readers will appreciate the author's incisive portrait of a black family's struggle with racism, powerlessness and their individual responsibilities to society. (Aug. 1)
FYI:Carter is also the author of
Drumsticks (2000) and other books in her Nanette Hayes mystery series.
