Southern Cross: A John Marshall Tanner Novel - Hardcover

Greenleaf, Stephen

3.86

59 ratings by Goodreads

9780688127725: Southern Cross: A John Marshall Tanner Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068812772X ISBN 13: 9780688127725

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1993

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When a racist hate group, the Alliance for Southern Pride, sentences an old friend to die, John Marshall Tanner's investigation leads to South Carolina along a trail of prejudice spanning generations. 25,000 first printing. $10,000 ad/promo.

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From Booklist:

John Marshall Tanner is closing the gap on 50 a little too rapidly--a fact made all the clearer by an upcoming college reunion. The reunion turns out to be the usual mix of memories, regrets, laughs, and love rekindled, but more germane is the case Tanner picks up while worrying about how his life stacks up to those of his peers. Former roommate Seth Hartman, long a civil-rights champion, is now an attorney in Charleston. Recently he's been receiving threatening letters from the Alliance for Southern Pride. Troubling Hartman most is his estranged son's involvement with the Alliance. Tanner agrees to help. Posing as a possible investor in the Alliance, he infiltrates the inner circle. On one level, this is standard, hard-boiled mystery fare, but Greenleaf's feeling for our common humanity gives the tale another dimension. The personal doubts Tanner expresses in the face of the upcoming reunion and the contented resignation with which he comes to regard his life as he works the case will generate a nod of recognition from most midlife readers. Wes Lukowsky

From Kirkus Reviews:

Fresh from wrestling with bogus AIDS therapies in Blood Type (1991), John Marshall Tanner takes on a generation of race hatred when he flies to Charleston to help lawyer Seth Hartman, an old college roommate who's been getting death threats from a white supremacist cabal called the Alliance for Southern Pride. The pot boils over when Tanner finds that the ASP has links to Seth's son Colin, his fianc‚e Jane Jean Hendersen, and Monroe Morrison, a black legislator he's defending on bribery charges. The reasons for the threats go back to Seth's days on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, all right, but not at all for the reasons he suspects. Greenleaf has a knack for making familiar scenes memorable-- thanks to his keen sense of place and character (his people unfold as gracefully as poison flowers)--and sharpening them by the all-too- believable whiff of large-scale menace so typical of this fine series. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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