Jay Porter, black civil rights activist of
the 1970's, has become ten years on, a qualified attorney and family man with a
wife expecting their first child any day soon. After the deaths of King, Malcolm
X, and a couple of Kennedy's, and the rise and fall of the Black Power movement,
there are now equal rights, but in Houston Texas that does not mean there is
equality.
But Jay keeps his head down and works hard
at his one-man practice, eking out a meagre living from clients often without
the means to pay, from whom he accepts goods and services in lieu. And it is
one of these – a birthday boat trip for his wife – that sets off a train of
events that will dredge up past feelings and test his current, head below the
parapet, resolve.
Rescuing a woman from the river that night involves
him unwittingly in a murder case that he can’t or won’t extricate himself from.
At the same time he’s dragged back into the fringes of politics; pressed to
open up an old connection with the current City Mayor to get her to intervene
in a labour dispute, over equal opportunities for black dock workers, which threatens
to spill over into the all-important oil industry.
The latter opens up old wounds and
re-kindles some of his latent anger at injustice; the former makes him a target
for mysterious forces that are trying to suppress the case. And somewhere
behind it all is a bigger picture he can’t quite fathom.
The narrative follows Jay throughout with
the tense current action interspersed with more reflective episodes from his
past. The multiple layers and themes are well handled, interweaving seamlessly,
and the prose is stylish and atmospheric, carrying the book easily through its
400+ pages.
By the end I had a quibble or two with
elements of the plot and its resolution, but these were minor and did not
detract from a good thriller set against an unusual and interesting backdrop of
race, oil and power in 1980’s Texas.
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