A Dangerous Road

A Dangerous Road succeeds on several levels. It is a damn good detective story. It is a story about race relations in the United States fifty years ago. It is a love story. It is a story about families and their secrets. All of this is woven about the tumultuous events during the sanitation workers strike in Memphis in 1968, culminating with the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Smokey Dalton, a black man in the segregated South, struggles to eke out a living as an unlicensed PI. Then (it is almost a cliché) she walks into his shabby Beal Street office. She is Laura Hathaway, a wealthy young white woman from Chicago. She hires Smokey to look into her family history. The thing is, her family history and Smokey's seem to be tied together somehow. And that is the mystery this story turns around.
Great book and Smokey Dalton is a great character. I plan to read the entire series.

Update: I wrote the above in November of 2012. I just listened to the audio version (October 2013), and it is also very good. The narrator nailed it. Powerful stuff.