Kevin Kenerly
2) The Bottom
Richmond is in a panic. For the fourth time in eighteen months, a young girl or woman has been brutalized and murdered. This time, the body of a fourteen-year-old is found in Richmond's Shockoe Bottom train station. On her ankle is the same perversely cartoonish tattoo that has led the cops and newspapers to dub the perpetrator the Tweety Bird killer. When Willie Black finds out that the night security guy at the station was lured away from his
...3) Oregon Hill
Willie Black is a reporter in Richmond, Va. Pugnacious and defiant, Black was once a star covering politics, and then he was captured by the bottle, messed up one too many times and found himself demoted to the nighttime police beat. He has three ex-wives, a daughter who tolerates him and bean-counter bosses cutting costs by laying off reporters. Then Willie happens to catch a late-night report about a body in a river, which is determined to be
...DNA evidence establishes the innocence of Richard Slade, who has served 27 years for the rape of Alicia Parker Simpson, who was just 16 at the time of the crime. Simpson, a member of a wealthy white family, identified Slade, a poor 17-year-old black, as her attacker. As Willie puts it, "When it came time to step up for Richard Slade, everybody stepped back." Slade has a brief taste of freedom before he's arrested for the shooting death of Simpson.
...Winner of the William Faulkner, William Wisdom Prize
An INDIE NEXT pick
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominee
A family with superpowers stumble in their efforts to succeed in life in this “original and wildly inventive” novel about race, class, and politics—based on a W.E.B. Du Bois essay (Toni Morrison)
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6) Parker Field
Les Hacker doesn't seem to have an enemy in the world—other than whoever tried to kill him with a high-powered rifle while he was sitting on a park bench six floors below Willie Black's living room window. Les is the closest thing Willie has had to a father figure in a checkered life of drinking, divorces and journalism. He certainly has better qualifications than any of the other men Willie's mother, Peggy, took in over the years. Of course,
...7) Warm Bodies
True is a probing, richly-detailed, unique biography of Jackie Robinson, one of baseball's―and America's―most significant figures.
For players, fans, managers, and executives, Jackie Robinson remains baseball's singular figure, the person who most profoundly extended, and continues to extend, the reach of the game. Beyond Ruth. Beyond Clemente. Beyond Aaron. Beyond the heroes of today. Now, a half-century since Robinson's death, letters
...10) First Evidence
A down-to-earth forensics expert has just discovered a crime scene that is out of this world.
In criminal forensics they train you to uncover evidence, no matter how brutal or bizarre the murder. But what if one night you encounter a crime scene so terrifying that no one on earth can explain it?
It begins deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, at the site of a reported shoot-out. Investigator Colin Cellars cannot find a trace of
...12) Willnot: A Novel
A brilliant new protagonist and his memorable community are introduced in the latest masterpiece by acclaimed novelist James Sallis.
In his celebrated career, James Sallis has created some of the most finely drawn protagonists in crime fiction, all of them thoughtful observers of the human condition: Lew Griffin, the black New Orleans private investigator; retired detective John Turner; the unnamed wheelman in Drive. Dr. Lamar Hale
...Ken Goddard's First Evidence series centers on what may prove to be evidence of extraterrestrial contact. In this third book, crime scene investigator Colin Cellars wakes up in the maw of an fMRI machine at a remote military hospital, having no memory of who he is or how he got there—but he quickly becomes aware that he is being hunted.
His instinctive response is to run, and he must rely on his new, incredibly enhanced sense of music
...James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name records the last months of this famed American writer's ten-year self-exile in Europe, his return to America and to Harlem, and his first trip south at the time of the school integration battles. It contains Baldwin's controversial and intimate profiles of Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Ingmar Bergman. And it explores such varied themes as the relations between blacks and whites, the role of blacks
...15) Outer Perimeter
And you thought first contact was terrifying.
From New York Times bestselling author Ken Goddard comes a terrifying thriller that dares to pursue the truth behind a series of bizarre occurrences—and a murderer whose identity even the authorities will kill to keep concealed.
A man of reason and science, Colin Cellars has earned a reputation as a top crime scene investigator. But Cellars finds himself disgraced after a bizarre episode
...A New York Times Notable Book
The moving, multi-generational debut novel from the author of On the Rooftop, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick
“Brilliantly juxtaposing World War II, the '80s and post–Katrina present, Sexton follows three generations of a Black New Orleans family as they struggle to bloom amid the poison...
17) The Lost Eleven: The Forgotten Story of Black American Soldiers Brutally Massacred in World War II
Their story was almost forgotten by history. Now known as the Wereth Eleven, these brave African-American soldiers left their homes to join the Allied effort on the front lines of WWII. As members of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, they provided crucial fire support at the Siege of Bastogne. Among the few who managed to escape the Nazis' devastating Ardennes Offensive, they found refuge in the small village of Wereth, Belgium. A farmer and
...A thrilling and accessible tour of the cosmos
Our true origins are not just human, or even terrestrial, but in fact cosmic. Drawing on scientific breakthroughs and the current cross-pollination among geology, biology, astrophysics, and cosmology, Origins explains the soul-stirring leaps in our understanding of the cosmos. From the first image of a galaxy birth to Spirit rover's exploration of Mars, to the discovery of water on one
...Overnight Code tells the story of Raye Montague, an ambitious African American woman from segregated Little Rock, Arkansas, who spent a lifetime educating herself, both inside and outside of the classroom, so that she could become the person and professional she aspired to be. Where some saw roadblocks, Montague only saw hurdles that needed to be overcome. Her mindset helped her become the first person to draft a Naval ship design by computer,
...Told through two haunting, interwoven diaries, Mia Couto's Confession of the Lioness reveals the mysterious world of Kulumani, a village whose traditions are threatened when ghost-like lionesses begin hunting the women who live there.
Mariamar, a woman whose sister was killed in a lioness attack, finds her life thrown into chaos when the outsider Archangel Bullseye, the marksman hired to kill the lionesses, arrives at the request of
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