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Thomas Canby has forged a new life for himself away from Atlanta. He was run out of his job and Atlanta after a scandal involving a prostitute, money, and politics. He has no inclination to return to Atlanta; his focus has shifted. Events in Atlanta conspire against him, and he is given a chance to clear his name. This opportunity, more than all the other reasons, lure him back into the morass which is made up of, among other things, murder and high-level politics.
Wealthy Negroes* are being murdered. Not just murdered but murdered in ways which cause the people who find the bodies to be physically ill. There is a madman loose in Atlanta, if the victims are anything to go by. Canby is asked by Vernon Thompson, now chief, to work the cases with a Negro policeman. Normally, the death of a few Negroes, no matter how gruesome, would not mandate this kind of action. This is where politics comes into play. The International Cotton Exposition is scheduled to open soon and the powers that be don't want the kind of talk floating around that these murders are creating. It would be bad for business. The political machine wants the world to see that Atlanta is back in business, Reconstruction is over, and all the right people are back in power. The same people that ran Canby out of town, as it happens.
Guinn is a master story-teller. Elements of the spiritual world, a world in which Canby doesn't believe, permeate the story. Time and again, Canby has to face his past, his prejudices, his personal narrative. Cyrus Underwood, the Negro policeman working the case with him, is a quick study in the details of investigating. He has a more powerful response to the spiritual, often surreal, aspects of the case. He forces Canby to address the prejudices of the time, both personally and professionally. Guinn, in having his characters deal with these issues, brings them home to the reader as well. For those who think the politics of today are messy and manipulative, the view Guinn gives of the post-Reconstruction South serves to remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. At least today, in theory, there is more transparency. Guinn's take on this world is fairly dark, although somehow hope is not totally lost. This bodes well if there is another in the series.
*I use the word Negro for two reasons. The term African-Americans did not exist in post-Reconstruction Atlanta and Guinn, in dialogue, uses the language of the time, polite and colloquial.
§ P.J. Coldren lives in northern lower Michigan where she reads and reviews widely across the mystery genre when she isn't working in her local hospital pharmacy.
Reviewed by PJ Coldren, December 2015
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