‘A brilliant blending of crime, mystery, and American history. Terrific entertainment’
Stephen King on Darktown
Lightning Men follows the multi-award-nominated, highly acclaimed crime debut Darktown into a city on the brink of huge and violent change – and full of secrets.
Atlanta, 1950. Crime divides, the fight unites.
Officer Denny Rakestraw and ‘Negro Officers’ Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith face the Klan, gangs and family warfare in a rapidly changing Atlanta.
Black families – including Smith’s sister and brother-in-law – are moving into Rake’s formerly all-white neighbourhood, leading his brother-in-law, a proud Klansman, to launch a scheme to ‘save’ their streets. When those efforts leave a man dead, Rake is forced to choose between loyalty to family or the law.
Meanwhile, Boggs has outraged his preacher father by courting a domestic, whose dangerous ex-boyfriend is then released from prison. As Boggs, Smith, and their all-black precinct contend with violent drug dealers fighting for turf in new territory, their personal dramas draw them closer to the fires that threaten to consume Atlanta once again.
Praise for Thomas Mullen
‘Magnificent and shocking’
Sunday Times
‘Written with a ferocious passion that’ll knock the wind out of you’
New York Times
Stephen King on Darktown
Lightning Men follows the multi-award-nominated, highly acclaimed crime debut Darktown into a city on the brink of huge and violent change – and full of secrets.
Atlanta, 1950. Crime divides, the fight unites.
Officer Denny Rakestraw and ‘Negro Officers’ Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith face the Klan, gangs and family warfare in a rapidly changing Atlanta.
Black families – including Smith’s sister and brother-in-law – are moving into Rake’s formerly all-white neighbourhood, leading his brother-in-law, a proud Klansman, to launch a scheme to ‘save’ their streets. When those efforts leave a man dead, Rake is forced to choose between loyalty to family or the law.
Meanwhile, Boggs has outraged his preacher father by courting a domestic, whose dangerous ex-boyfriend is then released from prison. As Boggs, Smith, and their all-black precinct contend with violent drug dealers fighting for turf in new territory, their personal dramas draw them closer to the fires that threaten to consume Atlanta once again.
Praise for Thomas Mullen
‘Magnificent and shocking’
Sunday Times
‘Written with a ferocious passion that’ll knock the wind out of you’
New York Times
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Reviews
Mullen again brilliantly combines a suspenseful plot with a searing look at a racist South
Violent, compassionate and brilliant.
Today's finest exemplar of the white-writer-black-cop tradition. Few other crime writers are as adept . . . social history made riveting
Morally complex and boasting more finely drawn characters, this outstanding follow-up to Darktown deepens Mullen's portrait of pre-civil rights America and deserves a place on every suspense reader's list.
Black vs. White doesn't begin to cover the complexity of the diverse relationships in this sharply observed novel
Behind an engaging story and challenging action for the protagonists, the friction between the races is ever at the forefront of the story, and the detail is at times jaw-dropping.
