Midnight in Memphis

Former attorney Dann debuts with a captivating historical thriller that finds 1950s Memphis at a potential turning point after the death of Edward Crump, a corrupt politician who puppet-mastered municipal elections and shaped organized crime for decades. Though hopes for the upcoming mayoral election are high, white homicide detective Burdett Vance, who made it his mission to challenge the “Crump Machine,” is skeptical things will change. Meanwhile, Vance is assigned to work an ominous murder case with Black officer Eustace Johnson. The decaying corpse of a white woman was found floating in the Mississippi River; stuffed inside a pair of stockings tied around her neck was a bottle containing a note: “No more lynchings. Time for payback.” Fearing that more white women might be targeted, Vance’s bosses throw their weight behind the investigation, and the stakes increase when Vance’s ex-lover becomes the killer’s next target. Dann smartly uses Vance and Johnson’s fraught partnership to highlight the racial tensions of the early civil rights era, and his prose is a cut above similar fare (Tennessee’s “railroads and rural byways strea[m] toward Memphis in an unbroken flow of riches”). This is an accomplished first effort. Agent: John Talbot, Talbot Fortune. (Nov.)