A Marti MacAlister Mystery

A routine investigation of an elderly man’s death leads to personal and professional complications for Marti MacAlister, the only black female police detective in Lincoln Prairie, Illinois. When the coroner finds that Henry Hamilton was suffocated in his sleep, Marti and her partner, Jessenovik know it’s likely he was killed by someone he knew. They also know that Hamilton, a deacon of Mount Gethsemane Baptist Church, is the stepfather Denise Stevens, a juvenile probation officer who has helped them on other cases. Hoping to prove that Denise is not a murder suspect, Marti looks into the victim’s church-centered community and his family’s troubled past. But the closer Marti gets to identifying the killer, the more protective Denise becomes toward her mother and sisters: Gladys, whose lifelong struggle for respect may have taken a dangerous turn; Belle, a nightclub singer whose flamboyant style has a desperate edge; and Terri, her father’s favorite, who feels trapped in her marriage to an older man. As the police learn more about who Hamilton really was, Denise withdraws further from the people who want to help her - until Marti is forced to assume that she and her sisters are keeping a terrible secret.