War at Home (Smokey Dalton Novels) Book

Anyone who doesn't realize that crime fiction can say a great deal about society has obviously never read Kris Nelscott's Smokey Dalton novels. Beginning with A Dangerous Road, in which the unlicensed African-American detective was caught up in the assassination of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., this series has established itself as a thoughtful forum in which the profuse ills of late-1960s America--racism, sexism, political polarization--can be scrutinized within the dramatic demands of fictional private investigations. War at Home, the explosive fifth Dalton outing, ushers readers into the midst of the anti-Vietnam War movement. It's 1969, and Smokey agrees to help his tutor friend, Grace Kirkland, locate her elder son, Daniel. It seems that the black merit-scholarship student has gone missing from Yale University after firmly establishing himself there as a "troublemaker," and at one point beating up an affluent white classmate who'd threatened Daniel's brainy girlfriend, Rhondelle Whickam. So Smokey, needing a (possibly permanent) break from the epidemic violence of Chicago, bundles his 11-year-old adopted son, Jimmy, and street-smart, 18-year-old orphan Malcolm Reyner (introduced in Smoke-Filled Rooms) into an old panel van and wheels off toward New Haven, Connecticut, naïvely hoping to return Daniel to class. Instead, the trio encounter bigoted cops, disillusioned would-be rebels, and ominous evidence of a bomb-making scheme. And as Daniel's trail leads onward to New York City, Smokey finds himself confronting a vengeful sniper and his own mortality, as well as the awful realization that Daniel Kirkland may not be as innocent as his mother believes, but rather a passionate young man who's "scary because he's so smart." Smokey's road trip reminds him that prejudice and poverty are just as ugly, wherever he goes. But War at Home's change of backdrop also means that we see little of this PI's increasingly interesting white girlfriend, Laura Hathaway. The compensations here are an introduction to Gwen Cole, a long-ago lover uneasy with having to revise her definition of Smokey, who had treated her badly; and the maturing Malcolm, whose pending induction into the military compels our Korean War vet hero to address his personal misgivings about Vietnam. Deftly juggling the requirements of a detective yarn with nuanced portrayals of the Nixon-era black experience, Nelscott (a pseudonym of science fiction author Kristine Kathryn Rusch) is producing a powerful, emotionally rich series that reminds us of just how much America hasn't evolved in four decades. --J. Kingston PierceRead More