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Product Description
In the second installment of Blair S. Walker’s Darryl Billups series, the intrepid reporter has left his blue-collar Baltimore roots for a new gig in New York. But life in the big city isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Luckily for Darryl, the Baltimore Herald is only too happy to welcome its star reporter back home, as are Darryl’s girlfriend Yolanda and her young son Jamal. Darryl is promoted to editor, but before long is itching to return to his former crime beat. He gets his chance when the nude bodies of African-American professionals begin turning up around town, their faces ominously marked with Confederate-flag decals. At a loss for suspects, homicide detective Phillip Gardner calls on his old friend Darryl for help unraveling the case. Darryl eagerly reconnects with Baltimore’s seedy underbelly and is soon hot on the trail of a killer who will transform his notions about gender, race, and the workings of the criminal mind. To break this story, Darryl must learn to look at the world in a totally different way—or become the killer’s most high-profile victim yet!
Amazon.com Review
Darryl Billups calls Baltimore "the world's biggest country town," and he's drawn to it like a magnet. He gained sensational success as a crime reporter for the (fictional) Baltimore Herald, where he exposed the neo-Nazi who tried to blow up the NAACP headquarters, an event chronicled in Up Jumped the Devil. Following this stint, Billups tried his luck as a reporter in New York. But the offer of a management job at the Herald and a $15,000 raise has brought him back to Baltimore, where he remains the hottest thing to hit that town since the Homicide television series.
Darryl's hopes for a quiet life are disturbed when someone begins killing people--all young, all African American, all upwardly mobile--and decorating their faces with decals of the Confederate flag. The tough old police detective who worked with him on the NAACP bombing case lets Darryl break the story to the country. Meanwhile, the killer--(who incidentally gets turned on by Jerry Springer)--gradually emerges from the shadows complete with a catalog of frightening surprises. The author knows his Baltimore, and he knows the inner-workings of a journalist's mind. He makes Darryl a most human and very interesting kind of hero. --Dick Adler
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