The Lightning Rule: A Novel

The tale of Detective Martin Emmett as he tracks a killer through the underground tunnels of Newark while the city above erupts in race riots.

Lightning never strikes the same spot twice. Or so the saying goes. But Detective Martin Emmett has stumbled upon an exception to the rule. The year is 1967 and the city of Newark, New Jersey is in the grip of a heat wave, bringing the racial tension that has been simmering for months to a boil. When the body of a black teenage boy is discovered in a subway tunnel, one finger cut from his hand, Emmett gets the case. The severed finger sounds similar to another report the reluctant, young Homicide detective read while banished to desk duty by his spiteful Lieutenant, who offers him a deal: solve the potentially incendiary murder quickly and quietly, then Emmett can return to regular duty. With his career on the line, Emmett sets out to do just that and discovers that somebody has been abducting young boys, using the sewers under the city as a maze in which to hunt and kill them in a twisted game of predator and prey. Set against the background of the infamous, real life race riot that tore through Newark in 1967, bringing the police force to its knees, Emmett must track the killer before the next hunt begins.

Brett Ellen Block received her undergraduate degree in fine arts from the University of Michigan. She went on to earn graduate degrees at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of East Anglia's Fiction Writing Program in England. She won the Drue Heinz Literary Prize for her debut collection of short stories, Destination Known, and is a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. She is also the author of The Grave of God's Daughter. She lives in Los Angeles.