From Booklist

*Starred Review* It’s Detroit in 1967, and the city is on fire. The larger world is on the edge of detonating, too. JFK is dead, and within a year, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King will be, too. The Vietnam War seems to be coming home. That’s the landscape for this ferocious novel that makes so many other, similar takes on the era read like tame exercises in word spinning. Violence, pain, and anger are palpably real here, and the effect is overpowering. Two men are on a collision course. One is a black Vietnam vet whose loss of a brother under cloudy circumstances draws him into a murderous gang of activists; the other is a white Detroit cop uneasy with the code of silence protecting his dirty colleagues. Both men have conventional fathers infuriated by their sons’ behavior, and the family quarrels aren’t just bickering. They’re incendiary in their own way, rich with the language of hurt. Oh, yes, there’s a murder mystery here, too, and the effort to unravel it provides a subtext that surfaces in the startling conclusion. Forget gritty—that’s far too mild. This one is genuinely noir, in that overused term’s darkest sense. --Don Crinklaw

EXERPT FROM THE TEXT 

Thomas didn’t stop walking or otherwise indicate that he had seen anything.  As he moved closer, he reached for his service revolver, placing his hand on the snap and undoing it.  He stepped on the pathway to his building and saw the vague figure of a man hiding in the hedge to his right.

Thomas’ heart sped up and his grip tightened on the pistol.  His mind filled with all his troubles and through the clutter one thought arose clear and cruel: someone would die tonight.

Suddenly, a car’s headlights went on across the street behind him.  The light bathed him, casting his shadow before him.

In that instant, Thomas saw more that just his own outline.  He saw the man by the hedge was just a jacket hanging from a cord with a skullcap perched on top.  The second thing he saw was the shape of another man crouching between two parked cars.

The light from the car across the street swung to the left as it turned.  All of the shadows angled to the right.  Thomas saw the crouching man‘s shadow rise.  He pulled his revolver and turned.

“Stop!” Thomas yelled, the gun now out in front of him.

The man moved with amazing speed and Thomas had to move back to keep some distance from between the attacker and himself.

The man stopped his advance.  Thomas held the gun leveled at the man’s chest.