A strict Christian woman, shy, unworldly; twenty-eight-year-old Lenora La Roche is a librarian in Joseph City (fictional), Louisiana. She's lived with a horrible, unsolved family mystery inJoseph City for most of her life.Lenora's grandmother, Adelaide La Roche, who raised her, taught her the Bible and how to love God. It's how Lenora approached life: with a sense of purity and kindness toward the world.A wicked house fire kills Adelaide. But hidden in a closet was a...

Suffering from a terminal illness, Miss Honey Gillette is a world famous/blues singer who believes God has sent her home to die. Or, has God sent Miss Honey home to Plattstown to meet Ruby Martinson, a ten-year-old miracle child? Eventually, Ruby Martinson becomes Miss Ruby Midnight, a jazz singer who in the 1940s sends the jazz world into a tailspin with her vocal gifts. But more importantly, Ruby has come to Chicago to establish herself, and where she is to meet Jimmy “Darkboy” Slade,” a...

Arfel Booker is a great young blues musician in the 1940s South. One night, after playing a blues gig in a new town, a beautiful woman takes him back to her log cabin to make love. In the morning (after blacking out from too much liquor), he awakens to an unwelcome surprise. Instead of the woman, an unfamiliar white man is in the bed, and the mans throat has been slashed with Arfels knife.Arfel knows hes been framed, so he makes a run for it and heads north by hopping trains. Once ...

Lomax Freeman, a homeless man, lives in a box in Upper West Side of Manhattan. Steven Hart, who works for the New York Times, rents in the Kensington building. Lomax’s box sits outside that apartment. After living in that apartment for a short period, Steve experiences a black man who’s intelligent, sophisticated, kind, and gentle. He wonders how Lomax landed on the streets of New York homeless. He wishes to do a two-part series on Lomax. Once the paper green-lights the feature, Lomax agre...

Camilla Valentine is a black, twenty-four year old farm girl whose striking beauty stuns Hawk Delano Thompson at first sight at the colored rodeo in Oklahoma. Their brief social engagement leads to Hawk corresponding with Camilla via a series of back and forth letters. Those letters reveal Camilla’s childhood dream to become a black actress in the year 1949—stage and film. Hawk could help her with that: fulfill her dream. Hawk, at twenty-seven, is a successful entrepreneur with big ideas l...

Money in 1923 is an object of excess, not restraint or caution. New York City is a metropolis of big business and Wall Street and gritty finance. Its the Gilded Age and Maxwell Engelbert De Wolfe loves being immersed in it. A New York-based financier and owner of De Wolfe & Fitch, hes one of the worlds wealthiest men. The fifty-four-year-old De Wolfe is trapped in a loveless marriage to Alexandra Bauer, a marriage arranged between two wealthy German families thirty-one years ago. To satisf...

When trainer Frank Black Machine Whaley of View Point, Texas, dies of a heart attack in 1946, Elegant Raines, an eighteen-year-old black prizefighter, must find a new trainer. Raines calls on Leemore Pee-Pot Manners, a boxing trainer who lives in Longwood, West Virginia. Any honest man would say Pee-Pot knows more about boxing than anyone alivewhether that man is black or white.Rainess goal is to become the heavyweight champion of the world. Under Pee-Pots tutelage Raines wins not ...

Fifty-two-year-old Maurice Teardrop Williams is a world famous blues mansinger, guitarist, and songwriter. But since Maureen, his wife of thirty years, died seven months ago, Teardrop has lost the joy he once found in performing music on the road with his band, the Tearmakers. With his light-blue guitar called Lillian, he returns home to Walker City, Iowa.Finding it difficult and lonely to stay in the home he once shared with Maureen, he moves in with his daughter, Arlene, and his ...

In a lily-white northeastern city of Pittsfield, sixteen-year-old Jimmy Robinson (quarterback), and Billy Mack (fullback) are national high school all-American football players. They have been teammates since Pop Warner football. Billy is black and Jimmy is white. A racial tragedy occurs in this lily-white city. The tragedy is not done by a racist or a bigot that will destroy Billy and Jimmy’s deep brotherly relationship but from an unexpected source—a tragedy so horrific that no parent wo...

Stanley T. Burns, a town bigot, witnesses the murder of a black man by a white man. The white man is Eddie Fulton, a local mechanic. At the time of the murder, Stanley T. Burns pledges loyalty to Eddie Fulton. A serial killer who’s now been set loose in the city of Summerville; who promises to kill all prominent black men. David Garcia, detective, and Mayor Eleanor Steele, mayor, will try their best to stop him. The letters mailed to the Summerville Journal, offer a vivid portrait of the k...

James “Brick” Carter is the father of two boys: James Carter Jr. and Justin Carter. A New Yorker born in Harlem, he lives in Queens with his wife, Florence. Brick is a subway engineer for New York’s transit system. In his youth, his parents nicknamed him Brick based on his stubborn ways. A Black man, Brick believes in family values and job advancement in the workplace from one generation to the next. He preaches that. Therefore, that value is to be applied to his sons James Jr. and Justin....

Modecai Jefferson is a young, dynamic 1940s jazz musician who carries his piano on his back, hears music every second of the day, and enjoys playing for his lover and biggest fan in Way City, AlabamaDelores Bonet. To Modecai, he and Delores are like black love notes on a musical page. But all of that is about to change the day he hears a recording of up-and-coming Harlem jazz trumpeter, Bunny Greensleeves. If he wants to make a name for himself, Modecai needs to find a way out of Alabama a...