P.I. Smokey Dalton is willing to clean up other people's messes-for a price-but he never lets his cases get personal. So when beautiful, white, patrician Laura Hathaway arrives from Chicago to find out why he's a beneficiary in her mother's will, Smokey reluctantly takes the job. It's February 1968, a Memphis sanitation worker's strike is beginning to erupt into riots, and Smokey's estranged childhood pal, Martin Luther King Jr., is coming to town to march. In an atmosphere charged with the threat of violence and impending disaster, Smokey's investigation will uncover a decades-old secret that could change Laura's life-and his own-forever.

More than a first-rate detective novel, A Dangerous Road introduces a passionate, wary, soul-wounded P.I. with a tragic past, unfulfilled promise, and a future up for grabs. Set against one of the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century, this provocative story combines the politics of race, betrayal, unexpected love, and the terrible cost of trust in a rich, compelling read to be long remembered.