In Edgar-finalist Nelscott's gripping fifth Smokey Dalton mystery (after 2004's Stone Cribs), the African-American PI and his "son," Jimmy, an appealingly plainspoken 11-year-old, agree to help locate the missing son of Jimmy's beloved teacher, Grace Kirkland. Daniel Kirkland, a Yale undergrad, has disappeared after failing to show up for spring semester. Malcolm Reyner, an 18-year-old short-order cook, joins the pair, making for a nicely balanced trio. As they travel from Chicago to New Haven, Conn., in the summer of '69, and then through various New Haven neighborhoods, a wealth of disturbing information about racial relations comes out. Smokey handles slights and threats with a sensitivity that's impressive but credible. Meanwhile, the three learn that Daniel apparently became involved with protests and explosives, and they find even grimmer hints about Daniel in New York City. Though a little too much time elapses before the boy's fate is finally revealed, the crisp writing and sharp details keep the story moving. Agent, Merilee Heifetz. (Mar. 21) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Nelscott at times seems burdened by the complex premise behind her Smokey Dalton series: possessing knowledge about the Martin Luther King assassination that the FBI wants to stay hidden, Smokey and teenager Jimmy attempt to live under the radar in late-60s Chicago. Reestablishing that context takes an unwieldy amount of backstory, but Nelscott somehow manages to jump the required hurdles. This time Smokey--uneasy on Chicago's South Side thanks to a devil's bargain he was forced to make with the infamous Blackstone Rangers street gang--agrees to search for a neighbor's son, a scholarship student who has gone AWOL from Yale. Traveling with Jimmy and another young black man, who is on the verge of becoming a draft dodger, Smokey drives across a landscape littered with racism, only to find more of the same in New Haven, where the trail takes him to the underside of the antiwar movement. Torn between his commitment to help the missing student, who is planning to bomb an army induction center, and his desire to do whatever it takes to stop the senseless violence, Korean War vet Smokey must confront his own ambivalent feelings about Vietnam. Nelscott consistently avoids pat answers to the moral and social questions of the era: the black scholarship student is both a dangerous urban guerrilla and a tragic victim of a society that merely pretends to open its doors to outsiders. The historical moment is palpable here, but it only heightens the timeless drama of an individual attempting to carve a life from the conflicting forces around him. --Bill Ott Copyright 2005 Booklist

A young black man's education at Yale turns him into a '60s radical. Daniel Kirkland, polite, ambitious, and brilliant, landed a full scholarship to Yale, which he left without bothering to tell his mother. Grace Kirkland, a Chicago schoolteacher distressed over not hearing from him for six months, asks her friend p.i. Bill Grimshaw for help. Bill left his identity as Smokey Dalton back in Memphis when he hightailed it out of there with ten-year-old Jimmy, who witnessed the real murderer of Dr. King. He's been edgy in Chicago, finding it gang-heavy and deadly (Stone Cribs, 2004, etc.), and is willing to look for Daniel. With Jimmy and Malcolm, a streetwise teenager helping with kid care, he starts the odyssey to New Haven, stopping at restaurants and motels that are "colored" friendly and avoiding trouble spots like rioting Philadelphia. At Yale, elitist administrators tut-tut that Daniel and Yale were simply not a good match: he was a troublemaker lobbying for black studies and higher black admissions, and he almost killed another student. But where is Daniel now? In response to being frozen out of Yale's all-white, old-boy hierarchy, is he advocating violent overthrow of the social structure? A ruthlessly unsentimental look at the '60s that shows just how ugly and destructive racial assumptions were. Nelscott bears witness to black persecution the way Elie Wiesel bears witness to the Holocaust. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.