Blanc Sur Noir

After penning two novels set against headline-making incidents of the late 1960s, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (A Dangerous Road) and Chicago's Democratic National Convention riots (Smoke-Filled Rooms), Kris Nelscott tackles less dramatic but hardly less explosive events in Thin Walls. Unlicensed PI Smokey Dalton knows that while laws often seem black and white, in 1968 Chicago, justice is rarely colorblind. So he isn't surprised to hear that white local cops haven't solved the knifing death of black dentist Louis Foster, who perished far from his home on a day when he'd mysteriously left work early. But as Smokey tries to reconstruct Foster's final hours, in the process endangering a photographer whose shots of the corpse may help identify the murderer, he can't help wondering whether the dentist's interest in a racially evolving neighborhood is to blame for his fate as well as the overlooked deaths of other black Chicagoans.

Not that Dalton has time for much pondering. Besides the Foster investigation, he's also trying to protect his 10-year-old "son," Jimmy, from pubescent street gangsters and act as a bodyguard for his wealthy white friend, Laura Hathaway, who's determined to wrest control of her late father's corporation from its patronizing male managers. Nelscott (a pen name of science fiction author Kristine Kathryn Rusch) isn't subtle in drawing comparisons between racism and sexism, with Smokey--an emotionally charged figure whose troubled history makes him question absolutists of any color or conviction--fighting for whatever fairness he can find. More densely plotted than Walter Mosley's recent Easy Rawlins novels, Thin Walls is equally stimulating. --J. Kingston Pierce