A Dangerous Road
   Kris Nelscott
  2000 St. Martin's Minotaur, NY USA
   ISBN: 0312262647


In February 1968 the Sanitation Workers' Strike in Memphis, Tennessee is beginning to turn the city into a stinking chaos & the impending marches & the arrival of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is churning up relationships between the races: the protestors & the police force & between a black PI & his very white client.

Take A Dangerous Road & meet this wholly new private investigator, Billy “Smokey” Dalton. He is trapped in a seething city & a sickening mystery which looks horribly like it's going to disinter his carefully hidden past.

At the age of ten Smokey, like a phoenix, rose from the ashes of his demolished family. Whisked away to a new family & exposed to the ways of the North, he graduated from ivy league colleges & now, in his thirties, he has been drawn back to the South. When he came into a small fortune, he asked no questions & spent the money wisely enough. Then he began eking out a living doing “odd jobs” as a private investigator.

Now a client walks through his door with a strange case that has all the signs of turning his carefully concealed past inside out. On top of that, this client is a young white woman with a wealthy way about her & a northerner's naivete about race relationships.

As the strike heats up in the garbage-clotted streets, a boy he's befriended follows his older brother by falling in with a crowd of dealers & agitators. Then the documents this new client unearths smudges the line between Smokey's past & his memories.

Then March turns into April in Memphis & his old school friend & choir mate comes to town to speak on behalf of the poorly paid garbage men & all hell breaks loose.

A Dangerous Road is a unique & blood curdling drive through a demented town, a fragile civilization & an ominous state of affairs & Kris Nelscott has kept the tension tight as a noose & as desperate as her hero's fears.

Taut, tangible & everso informative! Great fiction built upon epic facts! Can't wait for Smokey Dalton's next adventure. Very well done!

Kris Nelscott writes: “I...owe a debt to a place. The National Civil Rights Museum of Memphis, Tennessee, provided the most moving experience I have ever had in a museum. The displays bring the civil rights movement, its triumphs and its tragedies, to life. The museum is attached to the Lorraine Motel. Room 306 has been restored so that it looks the way it did on April 4, 1968, and is a sad reminder of what could have been.” The author lives on the Oregon coast where she's working on her second Smokey Dalton novel.
(01/28/01)

Rebecca