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A Novel
by Charlotte Carter
A curse rolls out over centuries, murky and unknowable as swamp waters, shaping and destroying lives.
Sarah Toomey is a successful young black lawyer, lovely but straitlaced– and afraid that she is losing her mind. Since the death of her mother, a force she can neither understand nor control is manipulating her memory and driving her to unexplained acts of violence and destruction. At the same time, Sarah is swept up in a highly charged relationship with a work colleague that portends a danger of its own. As she moves through her privileged life in New York, Sarah comes to learn how her past—her haunted history—is intertwined with America's.
Yvonne Howard was born into the working class. Now, after years as a prison guard, she has reinvented herself. Her passion for cooking has landed her a position at a trendy soul food restaurant, and she is looking forward to a glamorous career. Then an ex-inmate named Bitty appears, demanding Yvonne's help investigating her brother's shocking death. Before long, Bitty too is dead, and Yvonne is pulled back into a world of ugly violence. Smart but unschooled, Yvonne finds herself in the unlikely role of detective: it is she who must unravel the dark and blood-soaked history that not only doomed Bitty and her brother, but also determined beautiful Sarah Toomey's fate.
"A genre-defying, spooky, and original take on our country's deep racial trauma." —Kirkus Reviews
"Beauty in the Blood begins in the last year of the Civil War, as blacks flee ruined plantations, murderous Confederates, and treacherous Unionists. It takes us to New York in the year 2000, where successful black women find their lives threatened with a violence that implicates them in America's harshest racial crimes. None of us is exempt from history's torments, and none of those torments is simple. This is a riveting and wise novel." —Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Negroland and Constructing a Nervous System
This information about Beauty in the Blood was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Charlotte Carter is the acclaimed author of the Nanette Hayes mystery series. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of American and British anthologies. Charlotte Carter has lived in the American Midwest, North Africa, and France. She currently resides in New York City.
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