A new crime novel from award-winning journalist and labor activist Bill Fletcher, Jr.!In 1970, a sniper’s bullet shocks the sleepy Cape Cod village of Osterville. David Gomes, a young reporter for the Cape & Islands Gazette covers the story, thinking his reporting might lead to a job with a major metropolitan newspaper. With protests against the Viet Nam war and the rise of the Black Panthers roiling the public, the murder investigation becomes deeply personal when Gomes, a Cape Verdean American, encounters the smoldering racial antagonism between the descendants of Cape Verde and African-Americans, as well as the deep-seated hatred toward all people of color among some members of the white community.Gomes soon learns that investigating a murder can put him in the cross-hairs of a cold-blooded killer. It’s a dangerous place for the young reporter as he peels away layers of family history in his quest to discover the motive behind a savage act of murder, and comes to understand a complicated, contradictory history of his own people.Set within a Cape Verdean American community undergoing a transformation of its own consciousness, Fletcher’s crime novel dives deep into two timely questions: Is revenge ever a moral form of justice, and when does silence become complicity as criminal acts are committed before your own eyes?
Bill Fletcher Jr., the author of They're Bankrupting Us!(Beacon Press, 2012), and co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided (UC Press, 2009) is a long-time racial-justice, labor, and international activist, scholar, and author. He has been involved in the labor movement for decades, and is a widely known speaker and writer in print and on radio, television, and the Web. He has served in senior staff positions with many prominent union and labor organizations, including the Service Employees International Union, national AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Government Employees. He is also the former president of TransAfrica Forum.Bill is a proud member of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981.
