Dark of the Moon
On a cold and rain swept December morning, a hunter finds a human skeleton in the woods of Black Pool, Mississippi. For twenty, perhaps thirty years, these bones have lain in a shallow grave of dirt and leaves - until time and weather conspired to unearth them. Twenty-four years ago, Louis Kincaid was born to a black mother and white father who drifted out of their lives shortly after his son's birth. On leave from his job in Michigan, Louis has just started a temporary position with the...
Search in google:
On a cold and rain swept December morning, a hunter finds a human skeleton in the woods of Black Pool, Mississippi. For twenty, perhaps thirty years, these bones have lain in a shallow grave of dirt and leaves - until time and weather conspired to unearth them. Twenty-four years ago, Louis Kincaid was born to a black mother and white father who drifted out of their lives shortly after his son's birth. On leave from his job in Michigan, Louis has just started a temporary position with the Black Pool sheriff's department when the skeleton is discovered. But as he pursues his investigation, he quickly rediscovers what it means to be a black man in a white's man town, and what it means to be a half-white cop when he seeks help from Black Pool's African American community. The hostility he feels from both sides only escalates when Abigail Lillihouse, the passionate daughter of Black Pool's most prominent white citizen, falls hard for him. Most of all, Louis will find that he's stumbled onto a case that will tear Black Pool apart and spill secrets too ugly to bear. For there are those who have been waiting for years to tell the story of a long-ago night of terror - and others who will go to any length to silence them.USA TodayIn this dazzling debut, P.J. Parrish delivers a stylish blend of mystery, knife-edge tension, and a complex and intriguing hero readers care about.
\ USA TodayIn this dazzling debut, P.J. Parrish delivers a stylish blend of mystery, knife-edge tension, and a complex and intriguing hero readers care about.\ \ \ \ \ Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly\ The ghosts of a small town's bigoted past are tangible presences in this tense but predictable crime drama set in racially divided rural Mississippi. Mulatto police investigator Louis Kincaid is newly relocated from Detroit to the sleepy burg of Black Pool when a local field yields a gruesome discovery: the remains of a young black man lynched 20 years ago. Louis attempts to establish the man's identity and the motive for his killing but meets stiff resistance from diplomatic good-old-boy sheriff Sam Dodie and shifty local politicos who consider the past "over, totally irrelevant, and certainly not worth digging up." The two crime-scene clues Louis has to work with--a moldering book of poetry and a medallion linked to the antebellum white aristocracy--are soon compounded by the suspicious deaths of several town elders, which suggest the desperate attempt of someone, possibly the mayor or the district attorney, to keep the town's dark and dirty history secret. Louis, who is cut from the same stylish cloth as John Ball's Virgil Tibbs, is an absorbing character, unable to detach emotionally from his investigation and unwilling to accommodate Black Pool's arrogant attitudes toward blacks. His supporting cast, which includes an abundance of oafish white-trash cops and sympathetic Southern belles who introduce hints of taboo interracial sex, are too familiar and give the novel too many points of correspondence with In the Heat of the Night and similar racial ly charged crime thrillers. Parrish's debut is promising, but Louis Kincaid deserves future adventures that are more challenging and original. (Apr.)\ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsAn overwrought debut thriller set in the not-quite-ready-to-be-new South. It's 1983. To Black Pool, Mississippi, returns native Lewis Kincaid, drawn there by a dying mother. Not that he likes her much-she's a drunk, plus she deserted him-but Lewis is never one to shirk his duty. She's black, Lewis's equally no-account father was white, and Lewis can think of a dozen places he'd rather be than in a town where biracial means second class at best. There's Detroit, for instance, where he enjoyed the beginnings of a nice career in law. Now, however, to help pay the bills while he keeps his deathwatch, Lewis hires on as a deputy to Sheriff Dodie. It's a chance gig, which is to say it happens by telephone: Dodie, worn, weary, and a little dim, hires Lewis under the impression that he's white. Still, Dodie-that seeming redneck-has other sides to him. When the skeleton of a teenaged young black boy, victim of a 30-year-old lynching, is discovered, Dodie permits Lewis to investigate. It's permission granted reluctantly, of course. "Things like that are part of the past," Dodie says. Not to be dissuaded, Lewis starts to dig, an activity that rouses almost as little enthusiasm among the town's blacks as it does among its whites. Unwelcome, unpopular Lewis gets beaten, shot, and nearly lynched himself. But indomitable amalgam of super- and soaper-hero that he is, he takes on all comers, resists all temptation (an adorable white girl throws herself at him harder than a Nolan Ryan fastball), and leaves Black Pool a degree more enlightened than when he arrived. Clumsy prose, stereotyped people-and a first novelist who has to learn that in plotting the twist is better than the wrench. .\ \
