Old Bones

December 19, 2016
During a Take Back the Night vigil at Atlanta’s Spelman College (a predominately black women’s college), shots ring out, killing one student and wounding 10, in Boyce’s intense if flawed sequel to 2016’s Out of the Blues. The suspects flee in an SUV marked with a Confederate flag, fueling the notion that this was a hate crime. Det. Sarah “Salt” Alt pursues the suspects’ car, but they escape after firing shots at her vehicle. Later, Alt is called out to the discovery of a partially decomposed body, which is soon identified as 14-year-old Mary Marie McCloud. Alt feels a certain responsibility to Mary Marie, a girl she tried repeatedly to help during her days as a beat cop in the projects known as the Homes. Alt, who’s in mandatory counseling for two recent use-of-force incidents, feels responsible for Mary Marie’s death. Despite a scorching-hot plot, Boyce loads her tale with endless exposition; the flimsy characters aren’t strong enough to support the thoughts and ideas she asks them to carry. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates.

December 15, 2016
A second staccato tour of Atlanta's darkest corners for rookie Detective Sarah "Salt" Alt. "Downtown looks like Beirut," Salt tells James Simmons, aka Man, her symbiotic informant at the Toy Dolls strip club, and easy to see why. A protest at Spelman College has turned violent; sporadic riots are breaking out across the city; and the police have their backs against the wall. The last thing Salt needs is a case of old bones--the corpse of Mary Marie McCloud, a runaway who'd already gone through a lifetime's worth of pain and degradation, including a conviction for murder, before she was gunned down at 14. The death of Mary, no stranger to Salt, is worse than a distraction, an affront, and a tragedy; it's an irresistible invitation for her to stick her neck out. In between appointments with Dr. Ian Marshall, who's seeing her to help determine if she's really fit to return to duty after her first tour (Out of the Blues, 2016), Salt delves into the connections among Mary, habitual thief JoJo Jones, and Glory Glover, whose gig at Toy Dolls has been cut short by murder. Inevitably, she crosses paths once, which is once too often, with politically connected rap producer "Flash Daddy" Jones, who makes it his business to pay her back. He gets his chance when the videotape of a looting shows Salt handing a box containing a pair of shoes to Lil D, nee Darrell Mobley, Mary's brother, and leaves her vulnerable to criminal charges herself before she finally confronts Mary's killer. Dispensing with anything like conventional exposition, Boyce lunges at the caldron of Atlanta racial/sexual/institutional politics as if she can't wait to tear the lid off. Readers prepared for the deep dive will find themselves enlightened, sobered, and maybe even cautiously uplifted by the heroine's reckless courage.

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January 1, 2017

In this timely series entry (after Out of the Blues), Boyce sets her resilient protagonist in the middle of a protest gone sideways. At the predominantly black Spelman College in Atlanta, where students have gathered to call for police reform, a shooting disrupts what was otherwise a peaceful march, sending civilians and law enforcement running for cover--and answers. Alt is tasked with another investigation when the decomposed body of a young woman is found, and it's discovered that she's someone whom Alt arrested a few years earlier. Feeling responsible for finding out what happened to the girl, Alt throws everything she has into what has "cold case" written all over it, until she's called up to assist with the riots that have suddenly broken out following the shooting at Spelman. Boyce, who was an Atlanta cop for 30 years before turning to writing, captures the roiling tension of a city in turmoil. Alt, for all her power as a detective with an admirable moral compass, can only do so much toward fixing such systemic injuries. VERDICT In addition to being a fast-paced crime story with an empathetic, feisty lead, Boyce's latest also offers a meditation on violence and institutional racism.

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Starred review from December 1, 2016
Atlanta PD Detective Sarah Alt ain't like just any cop, says a young man from the notorious projectscalled the Home. Known as Salt, she's smart, compassionate, and dedicated to the people she serves and to her colleagues. Then she hits a bad patch. She's sent to a shrink to determine her fitness for duty; she and her colleagues are pulled off cases to do riot control after 11 Spelman coeds are shot during a night vigil; and she's warned that pursuing a particular lead in a murder case will put her career at risk. At the same time, she's trying to figure out how to make a permanent relationship work with fellow detective Bernard Wills, with two homes, three dogs, and five sheep between them, not to mention a department policy that would require one of them to transfer out of the homicide unit. In her second Detective Sarah Alt novel (after Out of the Blues, 2016), former Atlanta police officer Boyce presents a vivid, unflinching view of police work in a southern setting in which disturbing legacies can come to haunt native residents. An exceptional police procedural, with a compelling protagonist and strong moral underpinning.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)