Courtesy of a Dead Man

Persia Walker
Works of: Fiction
Publisher(s): Blood Vintage Press

What happens when people are forced to deny who they are to survive?
Some lie. Some run. And some kill.

It’s the 1920s and Fifth Avenue patrons are wining and dining Harlem’s elite. When an esteemed professor drops dead after dining at a rich woman’s table, most people suspect a heart attack, but one doctor suspects murder. He calls in Nathaniel Redding—New York City’s first black detective sergeant.

The city’s high and mighty fear scandal. They want the case closed—fast. Everett Carlisle makes the perfect suspect: a brilliant, difficult writer with a public grudge and the kind of reputation that makes conviction easy. Years ago, he and Grayson were lovers at McAllister University. When scandal broke, Grayson saved himself. Carlisle took the fall, fled to Paris, and came back hungry, angry—and not quite whole.

Redding makes the arrest. Then realizes he’s made a terrible mistake—the kind men die for.

He does what he should’ve done: follows a murder trail that leads from Fifth Avenue to Harlem, deep into the shadows of a man’s lost years in Paris, and finally down to Washington, D.C. It turns out Grayson wasn’t just a scholar polishing essays. He was sitting on a powder keg: financial fraud, missing evidence, and a blackmail note pointing to a secret he couldn’t afford to let slip.

Courtesy of a Dead Man is about a buried past and stolen future.

It’s about the damage people do when fear becomes a way of life.

It’s about guilt.

Just not the kind you can prove in court.