War at Home

It's summertime in 1969 when African-American P.I. Smokey Dalton and his adopted son Jimmy leave behind the hot violence of the streets of Chicago and head east to look for a missing college student. Daniel Kirkland never showed up for his spring semester at Yale University and seems to have disappeared without a trace. Daniel's mother, a local school teacher who works regularly with Jimmy, asks Smokey to see what he can find out.

The search for Daniel takes Smokey from the hallowed halls of the nation's wealthiest university to the poorest slums on the outskirts of New Haven. The harder he searches, the more he learns about the dark side of the anti-war movement, in which the idealistic young Daniel may have become involved. And he keeps hearing rumors about bombs.

When the trail finally leads Smokey to New York City, he discovers that someone might be trying to kill Daniel and Daniel's friends. Only nothing is exactly as it seems. Soon the rumors Smokey's been hearing become more and more concrete, and he knows it's only a matter of time before a bomb goes off. Because Smokey, a Korean War veteran, recognizes the pattern: He has stumbled into a war. A war at home.

In this blistering new book, award-winner Kris Nelscott continues her hard-hitting, absorbing look at the turbulence of the late sixties and early seventies, all in the guise of the modern crime novel.