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Check for Availabilityout of stock. Click on the button below to search for this title in other formats.  Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novelby Kris Nelscott
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:"I hear you help people find things." So begins the latest case for Smokey Dalton, Kris Nelscott's enigmatic African-American p.i. But when Mrs. Alice Foster comes to the door of his small apartment, she's not missing a pet, or even a loved one: She wants Smokey to find her husband's killer. Three weeks ago, Louis Foster was found propped up against a tree in a city park, stabbed once through the heart. The cops have given up, and Smokey isn't surprised: It's 1968, and the Chicago PD cops who responded to the scene have clearly written off the death of this black man as a mugging gone wrong, or something equally unimportant. Case closed. Not for Smokey. He starts at the beginning, enlisting the reluctant help of a photojournalist who took pictures at the scene. Then, going back through newspaper archives, looking for patterns, clues, wild theories-anything that will help him figure out why a middle-class black man would be found dead in a public park miles from home-Smokey learns something startling. Louis Foster doesn't look to be the first. Amid trying to protect his adopted ten-year-old son, who's being hassled at school by some older gang members, Smokey, the photojournalist, and two renegade cops who risk their careers to help him, set off on the hunt for a killer. Nelscott's Edgar Award-nominated A Dangerous Road, which introduced Smokey Dalton and told the story of the days leading up to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in Memphis, launched an atmospheric crime series set during one of the most turbulent times of our recent past. Now, in this third installment, she delivers a gripping thriller about one man struggling to build a life in this divided city the only way he knows how, and the men who would kill to stop him. Review:"[R]ecaptures the rage and helplessness that fueled the racial explosions of the late 1960s....Nelscott handles this busy plot with aplomb and convincingly portrays the frustrations of various groups of whites and blacks as inexorable changes create friction. Dalton is a strong, compelling hero facing a tough case and an equally tough fight to protect his son and survive." Publishers Weekly Review:"Books are not good or bad because of the importance (or frivolity) of their subject. In fact, the more ambitious they are, the easier it is for their faults to be held against them. But ambition has to count for something. In the three Smokey Dalton novels...Nelscott is doing nothing less than writing about the transition from the civil rights era to the period of black power....The mystery in Thin Walls is compelling, tense and cleanly written, while avoiding the macho clichés hardboiled detective fiction falls into so easily. But the drama is elsewhere, in the clash between Smokey's reasonable, ordinary goals...and the looming dread familiar to anyone who was alive in 1968. If I've slighted Nelscott as a mystery novelist, it's because literary critics do not usually credit genre writers (when they notice them at all) for anything beyond doing their job efficiently. Somebody needs to say that Kris Nelscott is engaged in an ongoing fictional study of a thorny era in American political and racial history. If that's not enough to get 'serious' critics and readers to pay attention to her, it's their loss." Charles Taylor, Salon.com Review:"Nelscott's earlier titles have been compared favorably with Walter Mosley's novels, but this volume is more like Easy Rawlins lite....Nelscott writes well, and each of the subplots would make an interesting story in its own right. Sardined together within a series of murders, however, each one is only glanced upon, so it's both a case of too much and not enough." Library Journal Review:"Nelscott doesn't use a specific historical moment (the King assassination or the 1968 Democratic National Convention) to frame the action this time, but she still puts the late-sixties setting to good use....Another fine entry in an outstanding series." Bill Ott, Booklist About the AuthorKris Nelscott lives on the Oregon coast. The first Smokey Dalton novel, A Dangerous Road, won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery and was shortlisted for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; the second, Smoke-Filled Rooms, was a PNBA Book Award Finalist. What Our Readers Are SayingBe the first to add a comment for a chance to win!Product Details
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