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A Novel (The Darktown Series)
From the acclaimed author of The Last Town on Earth comes the gripping follow-up to Darktown.
Officer Denny Rakestraw and "Negro Officers" Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith have their hands full in an overcrowded and rapidly changing Atlanta. It's 1950 and racial tensions are simmering as black families, including Smith's sister, begin moving into formerly all-white neighborhoods. When Rake's brother-in-law launches a scheme to rally the Ku Klux Klan to "save" their neighborhood, his efforts spiral out of control, forcing Rake to choose between loyalty to family or the law.
Across town, Boggs and Smith try to shut down the supply of white lightning and drugs into their territory, finding themselves up against more powerful foes than they'd expected. Battling corrupt cops and ex-cons, Nazi brown shirts and rogue Klansmen, the officers are drawn closer to the fires that threaten to consume the city once again.
With echoes of Walter Mosley and Dennis Lehane, Mullen demonstrates in Lightning Men why he's celebrated for writing crime fiction "with a nimble sense of history...quick on its feet and vividly drawn" (Dallas Morning News).
"Starred Review. Mullen again brilliantly combines a suspenseful plot with a searing look at a racist [1950s] South." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Mullen effectively uses the police procedural format to shine a light on the daily indignities and violence blacks suffered in the pre–civil rights South, while delivering a plot that never lets up on suspense." - Booklist
"It deserves a place on every suspense reader's list." - Library Journal
"This volume, together with its predecessor, suggests strongly that Mullen is working on an epic of mid-20th-century American transformation. If so, the growth of his three protagonists promises to be both fascinating and painful to watch." - Kirkus
"This is an extraordinarily talented writer working at the top of his game - each character, plot thread, scene, and sentence is a carefully crafted gem. Lightning Men and Darktown are must-read novels." - Michael Koryta, New York Times bestselling author
This information about Lightning Men was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Thomas Mullen is the internationally bestselling author of several previous novels, including Darktown, an NPR Best Book of 2016, which was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, the Indies Choice Book Award, and was nominated for or won prizes in France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The follow-up, Lightning Men, was named one of the Top Ten Crime Novels of 2017 by The New York Times and was shortlisted for a CWA Dagger Award. His debut, The Last Town on Earth, set during the 1918 flu pandemic, was named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today and was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for excellence in historical fiction. He lives in Atlanta.
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