Dark of the Moon - Hardcover

Parrish, P. J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1575663945 ISBN 13: 9781575663944

Publisher: Kensington Pub Corp, 1999

Synopsis

Louis Kincaid, the son of a black mother and white father, returns to Black Pool, Mississippi, to care for his dying mother, taking a temporary job with the local sheriff's department, only to find himself torn between two worlds as he investigates a brutal lynching that had taken place many years earlier. A first novel.

About this title

About the Author:

PJ Parrish has worked as a newspaper reporter and editor, arts reviewer, blackjack dealer and personnel director in a Mississippi casino. The author currently lives in Southaven Mississippi and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An overwrought debut thriller set in the not-quite-ready-to-be-new South. It's 1983. To Black Pool, Mississippi, returns native Lewis Kincaid, drawn there by a dying mother. Not that he likes her muchshe's a drunk, plus she deserted himbut Lewis is never one to shirk his duty. She's black, Lewis's equally no-account father was white, and Lewis can think of a dozen places he'd rather be than in a town where biracial means second class at best. Theres Detroit, for instance, where he enjoyed the beginnings of a nice career in law. Now, however, to help pay the bills while he keeps his deathwatch, Lewis hires on as a deputy to Sheriff Dodie. It's a chance gig, which is to say it happens by telephone: Dodie, worn, weary, and a little dim, hires Lewis under the impression that he's white. Still, Dodiethat seeming redneckhas other sides to him. When the skeleton of a teenaged young black boy, victim of a 30-year-old lynching, is discovered, Dodie permits Lewis to investigate. It's permission granted reluctantly, of course. ``Things like that are part of the past,'' Dodie says. Not to be dissuaded, Lewis starts to dig, an activity that rouses almost as little enthusiasm among the towns blacks as it does among its whites. Unwelcome, unpopular Lewis gets beaten, shot, and nearly lynched himself. But indomitable amalgam of super- and soaper-hero that he is, he takes on all comers, resists all temptation (an adorable white girl throws herself at him harder than a Nolan Ryan fastball), and leaves Black Pool a degree more enlightened than when he arrived. Clumsy prose, stereotyped peopleand a first novelist who has to learn that in plotting the twist is better than the wrench. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Kensington Pub Corp
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1575663945
• ISBN 13: 9781575663944
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 371