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Summary
Summary
Willie Bledsoe, only in his twenties, is totally burned out. After leaving behind a snug berth at Tuskegee Institute to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Detroit to try to change the world, Willie quickly grows disenchanted and returns home to Alabama to try to come to grips about his time in the cultural whirlwind. But the surprise return of his Vietnam veteran brother in the spring of 1967 gives him a chance to drive a load of stolen guns back up to the Motor City, which would give him enough money to jump-start his dream of moving to New York. There, on the opening day of the 1968 baseball season--postponed two days in deference to the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr.--Willie learns some terrifying news: the Detroit police are still investigating the last unsolved murder from the bloody, apocalyptic race riot of the previous summer, and a Detroit cop named Frank Doyle will not rest until the case is solved. And Willie is his prime suspect. Bill Morris' rich and thrilling new novel sets Doyle's hunt against the tumultuous history of one of America's most fascinating cities, as Doyle and Willie struggle with disillusionment, revenge, and forgiveness--and the realization that justice is rarely attainable, and rarely just.
Author Notes
Bill Morris is the author of the novels Motor City and Motor City Burning, also available from Pegasus Books. He is currently a staff writer with the online literary magazine the Millions , and his writing has appeared in Granta , the New York Times , the Washington Post Magazine , LA Weekly , Popular Mechanics , and numerous other newspapers and magazines. Bill grew up in Detroit and now lives in New York City.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Having focused on 1954 Detroit in his debut, Motor City (1992), Morris eloquently captures the Detroit of 1968, a city shaped by the auto industry, ravaged by violence, and rejuvenated by Motown, in this outstanding crime novel. Disaffected with the civil rights movement, Willie Bledsoe helped his Vietnam veteran brother smuggle a load of weapons to Detroit shortly before the 1967 race riots. Now, as he buses tables at a white country club and struggles to write his memoir, he's haunted by the fear that he killed a woman during the riots. Irish cop Frank Doyle has personal reasons for wanting to solve the murder, but develops a grudging respect for Willie, his chief suspect. Meanwhile, the Tigers' unlikely winning season unites a city searching for optimism amid racial and economic tensions. Morris adeptly evokes time and place, displaying a profound passion for Detroit and astute insight into the era's fraught climate. Characters represent a cross-section of the city's population, adding nuance to this tale of a young black man seeking his voice, a cop pursuing justice, and a country searching for a way forward. Agent: Alice Martell, Martell Agency. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A former Freedom Rider and a determined detective face unfinished business in the aftermath of the Detroit riots.Willie Bledsoe has left Alabama for the Motor City to write a memoir about how he lost faith in the civil rights movement even before the recent assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Although Willie is articulate and educated, the only work Detroit seems to offer a young black man is as a busboy at an all-white country club. But race doesnt seem to matter at Tiger Stadium, and in watching the battle for the pennant, Willie can forget for a while the part he played in the race riots the previous year. Frank Doyle, a detective with a gift for getting people to talk, is less willing to forget, since hes handling one of the two remaining homicide cases from the riots. The victim was the wife of a store owner in Franks neighborhood. A sexy art student working as a waitress and late-night one-way talks with his father, who died on the job at the Ford complex called the Rouge, offer Frank comfort but dont bring him answers. Then a new break comes when a witness recalls seeing two men go up to the roof and hearing them fire guns. While Franks searching for more clues, Willies trying to stay one step ahead of a past thats catching up with him in a city of flashy cars and Motown music, wealthy suburbs and burned-out neighborhoods, civic pride and despair.As usual, Morris (All Souls Day, 1997, etc.) uses historical figures and events, as well as a uniquely American city, as a backdrop for an intense cat-and-mouse game, though its not clear whos the cat and whos the mouse. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
RULES, RULES, so many stupid rules: "Don't switch point of view." "Don't give away the identity of the killer." "Don't write in the second person." Yannick Murphy, an author who seems drawn to high cliffs, ignores all the warnings in THIS IS THE WATER (Harper Perennial, paper, $14.99), an inventive thriller set in suburbia - and in the troubled minds of her characters. The second-person narrative voice that feels alienating at the outset ("This is the water This is the swim mom This is the bathroom") soon becomes hypnotic ("This is you, Annie") and then seriously unsettling ("This is the killer"). Annie, the mother of two girls on a competitive swim team, is the most appealing of all the moms in their pretty New England town who shell out $1,000 per child to get their kids on the team and hundreds more for those sadistically engineered racing suits that are supposed to shave milliseconds off their records. But while Annie dutifully volunteers to time the girls' practice swims and drive to out-of-town meets, she can never satisfy a fanatic like Dinah, who monitors everyone's moves and complains that "Annie and her daughters always seem to be doing what they're not supposed to do." One of the things Annie is definitely not supposed to be doing is having an affair with her friend's husband. But she's become morbidly depressed about her brother's suicide and she gets no comfort from her husband, whose business worries have made him lose all interest in sex. Under Murphy's probing touch, everyone in their circle of friends and neighbors is revealed to be struggling with the same kinds of personal strains. Husbands are distant, wives are distracted, oblivious to everything but their own problems. Which leaves only the sports facility's socially invisible cleaning lady with the clarity of vision to spot the killer in their midst. Murphy proves skillful at generating a proper climate of dread, forcing us to focus our fears on the killer's next victim. But her real accomplishment is her study of the anxieties reflected in the exacting rules of the club. "There is no crying at swim meets" is the first rule that needs smashing, for the mental health of the stressed-out moms and tightly wound girls we've come to care about. DESPITE ALL the guts and gore, David Mark's British police procedurals are a wholesome corrective to cop novels starring prima donna detectives who single-handedly solve major murder cases. Sgt. Aector McAvoy, the "gentle, humble, shy giant of a man" who commands our attention in SORROW BOUND (Blue Rider, $26.95), is clearly the hero of this brawny series set in the north of England. But, in the honorable tradition of Ed Me Bain and Joseph Wambaugh, proper attention is also paid to the other members of his homicide team. McAvoy, who is "O.K. with blood" and has a way of getting people to confide in him, is the right man to investigate the savage murder of a local political activist who tangled with an organized drug operation. But Mark surrounds his Scottish detective with fellow officers who make vital contributions to the case and are interesting in their own right. Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh comes the closest to being a rock star, with her biker boots, deep cleavage, thick mascara and "truckloads of attitude." But there are more where she came from, and at least one of these cops is scarier than the bad guys. THERE ARE CERTAIN advantages to being an auto mechanic. At least that's the case for Conway Sax, who moonlights as a sleuth in the latest of Steve Ulfelder's rural Massachusetts mysteries, WOLVERINE BROS. FREIGHT & STORAGE (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $26.99). As a man who prefers to work off the grid, Conway is pleased to be taken for someone who "looks like he came to pump out the septic," but as a former racecar driver, he can't resist throwing himself into breakneck car chases. Conway is the kind of daredevil hero who follows his passions, fueling the fury he feels when Eudora Spoon, a dear friend and a legend in his local A.A. chapter, dies in his arms after being shot by a sniper. "Everybody pays" is his mantra as he goes tearing after the villains who value an old lady's land more than they do her life. DETROIT WOULD SURELY rise again if that battered city could only wake up to find itself in 1968, reliving opening day at Tiger Stadium. In MOTOR CITY BURNING (Pegasus, $24.95), Bill Morris extends that promise of rebirth and redemption to Willie Bledsoe, who broke faith with the idealism of the civil rights movement when he and his brother ran a load of guns up to Detroit in advance of the 1967 race riots. But that particular violence is past, the Tigers are looking good, and Willie has a classic car (a pink and black '54 Buick Century). Sad to say, there's no peace or joy for the repentant Willie, who has also acquired a shadow, a cop named Frank Doyle who suspects him of having shot Victim #43, the last casualty in the last unsolved homicide of the riots. Morris sees something heroic in these well-matched adversaries, both representative of a city the author loves and salutes for "its swagger, its work ethic, its dirty fingernails and thick wrists, its ability to accommodate a crazy quilt of races and ethnic groups, shoulder to shoulder." And, of course, its great ball club.
