Charlene “Charlie” Mack is a PI in Detroit, born and raised in the city that America forgot.Charlie has built a highly respected private investigations firm through hard work, smart choices, and relentless ambition. Her team of investigators are highly skilled and trustworthy—but she secretly struggles with her sexual orientation and a mother with early-onset Alzheimer’s.When Charlie and her crack team head to Birmingham, Alabama, following the trail of a m...

“Some things just don’t keep well inside this house …”The summer of 1966 burned hot across America but nowhere hotter than the cotton fields of Mississippi. Finding herself in a precarious position as a black woman living alone, Bernice accepts her brother Floyd’s invitation to join him as a servant for a white family and she enters the web of hostility and deception that is the Kern plantation household.The secrets of the house are plentiful yet the silence that has encomp...

As a neurodivergent child in a hundred-year-old house, Zaji Cox collects grammar books, second-hand toys, and sightings of feral cats.She dances and cartwheels through self-discovery and doubt, guided by her big sister and their devoted single mother.Through short essays that evoke the abundant imagination of childhood, Plums for Months explores the challenges of growing up mixed race and low-income on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.

Born and raised in Detroit, the city that America forgot, Charlene “Charlie” Mack has built a highly respected private investigations firm through hard work, smart choices, and relentless ambition.When Charlie and her team of investigators are asked to take on a seemingly impossible case―to identify and thwart an attack on the upcoming Detroit Auto Show―it takes a $100K incentive and the help of a dozen freelancers for Charlie and her crew to unravel a twisted plot...

A hate group operating in Oakland County, Michigan, has claimed responsibility for a six-month-long string of arson fires and robberies at mosques, temples, and Black churches around Detroit, eluding police and federal agencies.The most recent fire, at a mosque in Dearborn, kills a respected imam. His children—suspicious of law enforcement’s treatment of Muslims and afraid of reprisal—hire Charlie Mack and her team of investigators to find their father’s murderers....

When private investigator Charlie Mack is hired by her ex-husband’s new wife, Pamela, things get awkward quickly.Her ex, Franklin, has been charged with his brother-in-law’s murder. Charlie and Pamela both believe he didn’t do it, but he has gone into hiding for some reason neither of them understands. To the police, it adds up to easy guilt, but to Charlie, it indicates that Franklin has stumbled onto something that likely comes with life-threatening complications...

Someone is murdering the homeless in Detroit’s Cass Corridor―by immolation.These horrific crimes wouldn’t require an investigation by Charlie Mack and her crack team investigators, except that one of the burned bodies is her mother’s friend. There’s a lot wrong with this case: the police won’t admit a serial killer is on the loose, drug trafficking intersects with the deaths, and a rogue cop is involved. The timing also couldn’t be worse―Charlie and Mandy are final...

When a guilt-ridden client has an unexpected change of heart, the Mack team’s careful preparation for his grand jury testimony is blown to smithereens. Now, Charlie and Gil must pull out all the stops to defend him from his new enemies and the estrangement of his father.Meanwhile, Charlie reports for jury duty and unwittingly begins to unravel a disturbing plan to alter the outcome of a crime lord’s conspiracy trial. Before she knows it, Charlie’s dangerous meddling lands a bull’s-...

A conversation starter like Three Women but centering the experiences of women of color: a mellifluous chorus celebrating the liberation, individuality, and joy of African women’s multifaceted sexualityThanks to her blog, Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah has spent decades talking openly and intimately to African women around the world about sex. For this book she spoke to over thirty African women across the glo...

**Grab your night-light and prepare to be CHILL-ed! This collection features the first two installments in the Disney Chills series, which brings elements of the most popular Disney tales into the present day with contemporary stories, characters, and twists.Part of Your Nightmare**Eleven-year-old Shelly Anderson just wants to be popular. Her parents have split and she has to start over at a new school with different classes, a brand new swim team, and an unfamiliar...

“Sesali Bowen is poised to give Black feminism the rejuvenation it needs. Her trendsetting writing and commentary reaches across experiences and beyond respectability. I and so many Black girls still figuring out who they are in this world will gain so much from whatever she has to say.”—Charlene A. Carruthers, activist and author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements“Sesali perfectly vocalizes the inner dialogu...

“We were the dreamers of dreams, the singers of songs. We were the music makers. We would not hear nor play nor love without each other. This is a prelude to our experience, an overture to who we were and how we arrived on the shores of friendship.”Beginning in 1939 prewar Prague, While the Music Played focuses on the story of young Max Mueller, a curious bright romantic—a budding musician, piano tuner, and nascent journalist. Max is on the cusp of adolescence whe...