Redbone: The Millionaire and the Gold Digger - Softcover

Stodghill, Ron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060897228 ISBN 13: 9780060897222

Publisher: Amistad, 2008

Synopsis

Lance Herndon was at the top of his game in 1996. At age forty-one he was a self-made millionaire, the owner of Access, Inc., a successful information-systems consulting company. As a prominent member of Atlanta's young, wealthy, and powerful set, he was surrounded by black Atlanta's "beautiful people." But when he failed to show up for work one day, friends and family started to worry. Their worry soon turned to horror when he was found murdered in his own home, his head smashed in—in what appeared to be either an act of jealousy-fueled rage or a seedier sex crime. With a laundry list of ex-wives and lovers, competitors, critics, and admirers in hand, detectives had to break through the city's upper crust to discover his killer. Journalist Ron Stodghill tells the riveting, true story of this investigation.

Part investigative thriller, part sociological commentary, Redbone offers a truly intriguing story that channels insight into one of America's great metropolises.

About this title

About the Author:

Award-winning journalist Ron Stodghill has worked for the New York Times, Time, Business Week, and Savoy, for which he was editor in chief. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Stodghill is the author of Redbone, and his work has been anthologized in Brotherman and has appeared in Slate, Essence, Black Enterprise, and Ebony. He is also a professor at Johnson C. Smith University, an HBCU in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife and three sons.

From Publishers Weekly:

In August 1996, Lance Herndon, a 41-year-old bachelor, and founder and CEO of the largest African-American computer consulting firm in the Southeast, was found dead, wrapped in a sheet on his waterbed with his head bashed in. His brutal murder rocked Atlanta's young black jet set, particularly when the sordid details of his personal life came to light. Was Herndon a sophisticated entrepreneur, fastidiously hygienic, extravagantly generous? Or was the dead man a schemer with a failing business empire who embodied a black "crisis of wasted intellectual and moral capital" and who was brought down by an insatiable appetite for deviant sex with women he called "redbones," petite, light-skinned black women? One redbone is now serving 10 years for killing him as he slept after they had sex: Dionne Baugh, a hotheaded Jamaican immigrant, was enraged that Herndon wasn't planning to appear in court to ask for charges against her to be dismissed in an earlier trespassing charge at his home. Stodghill, former editor-in-chief of Savoy magazine, spins an absorbing yarn, but while his analyses and social commentary about money and power in the black New South are cogent, they lack the immediacy and power of the best true crime works. Photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Amistad
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0060897228
• ISBN 13: 9780060897222
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256