Snowden Wright (American Pop; Play Pretty Blues) immerses his readers in a gritty, troubled small-town Mississippi with The Queen City Detective Agency, and introduces an indomitable protagonist.
It's the 1980s and the country is about to reinaugurate Ronald Reagan when a small-time felon called Turnip does "a Greg Louganis off the roof" of the county courthouse in Meridian, Miss. Turnip's suspicious death (by rooftop dive, or was it by poison?) and the murder he may or may not have helped arrange wind up entangled with a mythical criminal syndicate, cockfighting rings, domestic violence, child brides, centuries-old institutional racism and class discrimination, and much more.
Enter Clementine Baldwin (that's Clem or Ms. Baldwin to you) of Queen City Detective Agency in Meridian, a decaying railroad town. A disillusioned former cop, Clem is also a Black woman in a city, state, and nation that respects neither. Clem is a quintessential hard-boiled detective with entirely legitimate beefs with the world around her. She drinks too much, but who wouldn't? For her second-in-command, she went looking for a white man for a prop, but instead she found Dixon Hicks, a prop who turned out to be a good partner and even a good friend.
Clem is a smart, courageous, flawed heroine, with plenty of dark humor and a storied past. Wright's prose is clever and delightfully funny even while handling serious social ills. The Queen City Detective Agency is a remarkable work of Southern noir, featuring crackpot characters both silly and sinister, a longstanding history of greed and white privilege, and an unforgettable private investigator. Readers will be anxious for more featuring Ms. Baldwin. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia