KRIS NELSCOTT – Days of Rage. Nominated for Best Private Eye Hardcover Novel of the Year, 2007.

St. Martin’s, hardcover, March 2006.

   Book Description:

Days of Rage

As racial tensions mount during the 1969 celebrity trial of the Chicago Eight, African American PI Smokey Dalton is keeping a low profile with his son, Jimmy, who knows a dark secret about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. When Smokey finds a group of skeletons hidden in the wall of a building hes inspecting for investor Lara Hathaway, his investigation leads him into Chicago’s racist past and implicates some of the nation’s most powerful people in a deadly 1919 riot.

   About the Author:

Kris Nelscott [pseudonym of Kristine Kathryn Rusch] lives on the Oregon coast. The first Smokey Dalton novel, A Dangerous Road, won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery and was shortlisted for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; the second, Smoke-Filled Rooms, was a PNBA Book Award Finalist; the third, Thin Walls, was one of the Chicago Tribune’s best mysteries of the year; the fourth, Stone Cribs, was honored by the Wisconsin Library Association as one of the best books of 2005, and it and the fifth, War at Home, were both shortlisted for the Oregon Book Award. Visit her Web site at www.kristinekathrynrusch.com.

   Review Excerpts:

Publishers Weekly: “Set in 1969 during the trial of the Chicago Eight, Edgar-finalist Nelscott’s sixth Smoky Dalton novel (after 2005’s War at Home) deftly interweaves the issue of race with politics, societal questions and personal relationships, like Smokey’s on-again, off-again romance with Laura Hathaway, a white businesswoman. […] Laura and Smokey bring in Wayne LeDoux, a persnickety criminologist, to do forensic work at the house, and Tim Minton, an expert from a local funeral home, joins him. The two men form a special bond, and like the bond between Smokey and his adopted son, make a suspenseful mystery into something much richer.”

Booklist: “In her compelling Smokey Dalton series, Nelscott continues to probe the human drama and complex emotion beneath the headlines of the racially tense 1960s. […] Nelscott builds suspense effectively while making the reader feel the historical burden of racial hatred. After five novels all set between spring 1968 and fall 1969, this series was beginning to seem almost frozen in its historical moment, but this time, Nelscott, by widening the time frame, allows us to see the events of the ’60s – and their devastating effects on individual human lives – from a wider (if hardly comforting) perspective.”

   Previous Smoky Dalton novels:

A Dangerous Road. St. Martin’s, hardcover, July 2000. Paperback: June 2001.

Smoke-Filled Rooms. St. Martin’s, hardcover, August 2001. Paperback: June 2002.

Thin Walls. St. Martin’s, hardcover, September 2002. Trade paperback: February 2004.

Stone Cribs. St. Martin’s, hardcover, February 2004. Trade paperback: January 2005.

War at Home. St. Martin’s, hardcover, February 2005. Trade paperback: December 2005.