Sweet Sunday

September 1, 2014
The summer of 1969, a time of change, activism, and turmoil in the U.S., gets a dense, uninspired look in this standalone from Lawton, best known for his Inspector Troy series (Black Out, etc.). Turner Raines has failed at just about everything, except as a PI specializing in tracking young men who have fled to Canada to avoid the draft. He doesn’t bring them back, but instead bears messages from their families. While Turner is on one of these trips, someone murders his best friend, journalist Mel Kissing, in the detective’s New York City office with an ice pick. Believing Mel’s murder is linked to a story about Vietnam he was working on for the Village Voice, Turner begins an investigation that takes him across the country, to visit soldiers, civil rights activists, and his own fractured Texas family. Events such as the Vietnam War, the moon landing, and Woodstock come across as items to be crossed off a checklist rather than plot points. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Associates (U.K.).

Starred review from September 1, 2014
For most of the country, the foment, tumult, and madness of the 1960s is either dimly remembered or distant historythe courage displayed during the civil rights movement and the violence the volunteers faced; the urban riots, the antiwar movement, the counterculture, the police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. That era is Lawton's subject in his latest historical thriller, quite a switch from his just-concluded WWII series (Then We Take Berlin, 2013). Texan Turner Raines is his narrator in this wonderfully evocative novel. Raines and his law-school friend, brash New Yorker Mel Kissing, join the civil rights movement, and Raines nearly dies in Mississippi. Returning to New York, Mel becomes a reporter for the Village Voice, and Raines finds a niche as a PI, specializing in tracking down draft dodgers in Canada to assure their parents that their kids are alive and well. But Mel is murdered, and Raines embarks on a strange and dangerous road trip to identify the killer. Throughout the book, NASA's space successes offer an ironic counterpoint to the turmoil and excesses of the decade. Author Norman Mailer's antic campaign to become mayor of New York City provides some welcome comic relief. Overall, Lawton has brilliantly captured the careening zeitgeist of the '60s. Those who remember the era firsthand, as well as younger readers, will be engaged, edified, and entertained by Sweet Sunday.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)