\u201cIt wasn\u2019t the trucks themselves that did it. The parade of them, in tandem. The gears crunching and groaning. One after another, rolling in jerks and stalls. Chassis straining against the weight of homegrown boys and men\u2014hunched in olive and camouflage, armed and outfitted. It was the feeling they evoked in me.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Three boys missing in Philadelphia, Mississippi, twenty-five miles down the road where the trucks were headed. Would today be the day they found them?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cheerleader practice could not hold my full attention. Was anybody else asking the same questions I was:  could it have happened here, in Plattstown? No. Not in this town. Only over there. I wanted all my girlfriends to agree that nobody we knew could possibly have attacked those boys. We were better.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Reed has said that growing up in the Jim Crow South, in a place much like her fictional Plattstown, she asked the questions protagonist Malee asks in the novel.<\/em> Like Malee, she tried to ignore the controversies of the day and live as a \u201cnormal\u201d teenager. Malee has an early lesson with privilege when her friendship with the Black housekeeper\u2019s daughter is curtailed due to the demands of segregation.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The novel takes Malee from the awakening provoked by the murder of the three boys to a lifelong journey leading<\/span><\/span> to the realization that privilege, be it White or male, exacts a price from both Blacks and Whites and from men as well as women.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span> A<\/span><\/span>s an editor in a New York publishing house, Malee encounters Yankee-style racial prejudice that ironically collides with the sexual bias she faces in the male-dominated world of publishing. Malee\u2019s experience, Reed points out, echoes the privilege and prejudice she met in the eighties as a female lawyer.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Born in Louisville, Mississippi, Reed has an undergraduate degree in drama and a law degree from Southern Methodist University. Her husband, Bob Reed, is the author of The Red Winged-Blackbird, <\/em>a novel about the Ludlow Massacre and the Colorado Coalfield War. It is the first volume in a projected trilogy.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Regular roundup of new and recent Texas mystery<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[813,830,839,849],"class_list":["post-2362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-lone-star-literary-life","tag-lonestarliterarycom","tag-mystery","tag-texasreads"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}