Scott Lasser's Say Nice Things About Detroit is a harsh but tender homage to his native city that tackles the city's racial tensions head on. It opens with the double murder of a retired black FBI agent and a beautiful white woman--not a typical urban murder about sex and drugs, though: Dirk Burton and Natalie Brooks were brother and sister, sharing the same German immigrant mother who left Dirk and his African-American father, then married an Englishman who fathered Natalie. Her children grew up in very different neighborhoods with very different opportunities and expectations.
Natalie's ex-boyfriend David, a divorced lawyer in Denver, comes home to help his father deal with his mother's dementia. Natalie's younger sister, Carolyn, unhappily married in Los Angeles, returns for her sister's funeral. David reconnects with Carolyn in a passionate love affair. When she becomes pregnant, they decide to move back to Detroit to raise their child together. Although she cautiously suggests "it's like moving back to Hiroshima," he answers, "But people live there now, I'm pretty sure."
Things are not so simple, however; there's the double murder to resolve, failing parents to care for and even more complicated interracial family dynamics that threaten to jeopardize their romance.
Lasser's (Battle Creek) intimate understanding of the city makes for a captivating novel rich with details of the local vernacular, weather, food, music, crime and, of course, cars. Detroit is not just the setting for Lasser's story--it's a place with a beating heart (weak pulse notwithstanding) and enough guts to have a future. --Bruce Jacobs