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October 2
Hardback
• Paperback
A Dangerous Road
by Kris Nelscott
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Reviewed by Ted Fitzgerald
A Dangerous Road begins in flight and
ends in a turn back to home, but before this
circle is completed, Kris Nelscott presents a
tale of secrets, heritage, family, race, politics,
responsibility, love, fear, violence,
abandonment, charity, history, hope, and
hopelessness, and how all these factors can
influence, even chart, the course of a man's
life and the evolution of his character.
The man in question is Billy "Smokey"
Dalton, an anomaly in the African-American
community of Memphis, Tennessee, in the
winter of early 1968. That winter, the bitter
sanitation workers' strike will bring the
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to the
blighted, garbage-strewn city where his
peacemaker's life will be ended by violence. A
private detective-in his own words, a man
who'll "clean up other people's messes-
usually for a price"-college-educated, a
Korean veteran, a friend of Dr. King's (though
few know how far they actually go back), Billy
Dalton is a man who is respected in his
community but who stands apart from it,
eschewing interest in civil rights and politics,
a professional whose career was jump-started
eight years earlier by an anonymous bequest
of $10,000.
Into Billy Dalton's office steps Laura
Hathaway, a white woman of means who
wants to know why her recently deceased
mother has left him $10,000 in her will. With
that one question, several lives change
forever. Billy agrees to help, knowing that in
finding the answer to Laura Hathaway's
question, he will likely learn the identity and
the motivation of his earlier benefactor. As
their search progresses, it becomes an inquiry
into the murky, hidden family histories of
both Laura and Billy, two people with no
possible connection between them except the
one that has been hidden from them through
three decades of silence, misdirection and
even charity.
The search is long and widespread, leading
Billy back into his childhood, uncovering the
roots of the violence that took his parents'
lives and his own identity. The revelations
are many and devastating, but Billy Dalton's
critical epiphany occurs the night before Dr.
King's assassination, as he listens to his
childhood friend's final speech. "Not the
words that everyone quotes," he points out,
but the part of the speech that retells the
parable of the Good Samaritan, challenging
the audience to develop "a dangerous
unselfishness" that asks not what the
consequences will be to passersby if they stop
to help a fallen brother, but what will happen
to the stricken one if they fail to act. The
words and their spirit move Billy to action,
for others as well as himself, placing him in
the chaotic crosshairs of Dr. King's murder.
In her first crime novel, Nelscott
(reportedly a pseudonym for fantasy writer
Kristine Kathryn Rusch) sets herself a major
challenge, combining an intricate,
multilayered
puzzle worthy of Lew Archer, a
complex and involving character study,
provocative history and social observation,
and a strong, confident narrative that never
lets any one element overwhelm the tale.
And she pretty much succeeds.
What holds together A Dangerous Road,
successfully fusing its diverse elements, is the
singular voice of Billy Dalton. A cautious and
passionate narrator, shaped by a young life of
violence, abandonment, and betrayal, he
cloaks his own secrets from the reader, letting
out bits and pieces only gradually, after
making the reader earn his trust. It's as if Billy
Dalton is relating his tale one-on-one to each
reader. That's as rare as it is remarkable. Billy
Dalton is a man worth knowing. Kris Nelscott
is a writer who bears watching. And their
road is one worth traversing.
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