Hidden in Plain View (A Darryl Billups Mystery) - Softcover

Blair S. Walker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935597612 ISBN 13: 9781935597612

Publisher: AmazonEncore, 2011

Synopsis

In the second installment of Blair S. Walker’s Darryl Billups series, the intrepid reporter has left his blue-collar Baltimore roots for a new gig in New York. But life in the big city isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Luckily for Darryl, the Baltimore Herald is only too happy to welcome its star reporter back home, as are Darryl’s girlfriend Yolanda and her young son Jamal. Darryl is promoted to editor, but before long is itching to return to his former crime beat. He gets his chance when the nude bodies of African-American professionals begin turning up around town, their faces ominously marked with Confederate-flag decals. At a loss for suspects, homicide detective Phillip Gardner calls on his old friend Darryl for help unraveling the case. Darryl eagerly reconnects with Baltimore’s seedy underbelly and is soon hot on the trail of a killer who will transform his notions about gender, race, and the workings of the criminal mind. To break this story, Darryl must learn to look at the world in a totally different way—or become the killer’s most high-profile victim yet!

About this title

Review:

Darryl Billups calls Baltimore "the world's biggest country town," and he's drawn to it like a magnet. He gained sensational success as a crime reporter for the (fictional) Baltimore Herald, where he exposed the neo-Nazi who tried to blow up the NAACP headquarters, an event chronicled in Up Jumped the Devil. Following this stint, Billups tried his luck as a reporter in New York. But the offer of a management job at the Herald and a $15,000 raise has brought him back to Baltimore, where he remains the hottest thing to hit that town since the Homicide television series.

Darryl's hopes for a quiet life are disturbed when someone begins killing people--all young, all African American, all upwardly mobile--and decorating their faces with decals of the Confederate flag. The tough old police detective who worked with him on the NAACP bombing case lets Darryl break the story to the country. Meanwhile, the killer--(who incidentally gets turned on by Jerry Springer)--gradually emerges from the shadows complete with a catalog of frightening surprises. The author knows his Baltimore, and he knows the inner-workings of a journalist's mind. He makes Darryl a most human and very interesting kind of hero. --Dick Adler

From the Back Cover:

After earning national acclaim for his story exposing a plot by domestic terrorists to blow up NAACP headquarters, The Herald rewards Darryl with an editorship, but it’s not long before he’s itching to escape the office and return to the streets as a cop reporter chronicling the misdeeds of Baltimore’s seamy underbelly. He gets his chance when the nude bodies of African-American professionals begin turning up around town, their faces ominously marked with Confederate-flag decals. At a loss for suspects, Baltimore homicide detective Phillip Gardner calls on his old friend Darryl to help with the serial-killer investigation. Tense, engaging, and utterly unpredictable, this second Darryl Billups thriller forces him to confront long-held notions about gender, race and the workings of the criminal mind. Billups rapidly learns to look at the world in a new way in a desperate bid to avoid becoming the killer’s most high-profile victim.

About this edition

• Publisher: AmazonEncore
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1935597612
• ISBN 13: 9781935597612
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 229