Customer Reviews

War at Home (Smokey Dalton Novels)

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This fifth book in the series is one of the most complex and satisfying. We learn some things about Smokey's past that give his character more substance, as well as complement the story line. Not being black, I can't judge how Nelscott portrays a black man in the late 60s, but the settings and dialogue have a sense of realness that I appreciate as a reader. Right from the first book, I cared about the characters, especially Smokey and Jim, and could hardly wait to read the rest of the series. Nelscott is a very good and versatile writer of genre fiction. Her Star Trek novels (as Kristine Katharine Rusch) are some of my absolute favorites.

WAR AT HOME presents another tale of Smokey Dalton, author Kris Nelscott's part-time black detective. In her Smokey Dalton novels (this is the fifth book in the series), Nelscott has used the conventions of the genre mystery to detail race relations and the civil rights movement in the 1960s, by tying her plots with key events -- Martin Luther King's assassination, the 1968 Democratic convention, and, in this book, the burgeoning anti-war movement. In this book Smokey, his "son" Jimmy, and street-smart friend Malcom Reyner travel from Chicago to Connecticut and New York City in search of teacher Grace Kirkland's missing son, Daniel. The search brings Smokey into contact with a group of anti-war radicals, in the fashion of the real-life Weathermen, and a plot to bomb various establishment fixtures. What I find amazing is that this convincing and engrossing view of what it meant to be a black man during that turbulent era is written by a young white woman from Oregon; as with all of the Smokey Dalton books, this is a recommended read.

Kris Nelscott is adept at creating characters that are exciting, intense, and mysterious and Smokey Dalton is one of her key fictional characters who meets all of those descriptors in all of her Smokey Dalton books, of which War at Home is the fifth. In this book, Nelscott draws the reader to one of the most desperate times in modern day history, the conflict of the Vietnam War and the protests that developed stateside, oftentimes within the same home, pitting parents against children, even tearing apart what were once close relationships. Nelscott has the reader looking into the crystal ball into the past, giving us the emotions, the physical characteristics of a time that so many which were long forgotten.

War at Home finds African American private eye Smokey Dalton, the one the black community goes to in Chicago to solve crimes that the Chicago police can't or won't solve, packing his bags for the east coast to track down the son of a friend, Grace Kirkland, who is the tutor for Smokey's adopted son, Johnny. Daniel Kirkland, a bright but hot tempered young black man fresh from the Chicago ghettos, has been declared missing by Yale University and can't be found by his mother who has given all she's had to make sure that he makes it to the right school. But, Daniel is caught up in the fever of the times and has become not only a black militant but an anti-war militant who has adopted the violent life-styles and skills of the militant underground group, the Weathermen Underground.

Smokey's charge is to find Daniel and to report home. But, he finds that it's not that easy and runs into what he hoped he could run away from in Chicago-racism with police and racism with Yale University faculty and administrators. Smokey's travels take him through proverty-striken, neglected buildings that are the refuge for bombs and angry young people whose blind hatred of the war gets them into situations where they discover themselves drowning in confusion.

Nelscott draws us into the complexities of Smokey's quiet but intense character, a man who is in an affair with a white woman, Laura Hathaway, who is trying to undo the wrong her deceased wealthy, crooked businessman father did in Chicago. Smokey is the adopted father of an 11 year-old boy, Johnny, who is his partner in running away from the FBI after the assasination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, TN because Johnny was a witness to the killing of the civil rights leader and he knows who really shot MLK, Jr. And, we are treated to the growing pangs of 18 year-old orphan Malcolm Reyner, who is attempting to blow away the smoke and fog of his confusion about the Vietnam War and the draft and his role as a young man in a low-income community where black youth join gangs to become so-called real men and find a family, albeit dysfuntional and violent.

Though Nelscott is a white middle-class woman who hails from Wisconsin and is now living on the Oregon coast, her meticulously done research is clearly apparent as she has identified so many of the cultural nuances of the black culture in Chicago, Hartford, Connecticut, and New York City. It's obvious that she walked the streets of New York because her detailed descriptions have you hearing the sounds, smelling the odors and feeling the grit that only New York can offer.

She also knows how young people in the late 60's and early 70's reacted to the war as she spent many years in Madison, WI where so many of the major student revolts occurred, especially the bombing of Sterling Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus that accidently killed a researcher in the Army-Math labs who happened to get caught in the middle between violent student activists and campus military research.

Nelscott's fifth novel is truly a page turner, one that I could not put down until it was all over. I highly recommend this novel for anyone looking for a different kind of mystery novel, one that includes historical facts mixed with cultural senses and brings you into a world that only Kris Nelscott can create.

Note: I have been an editing reader for Kris Nelscott (pen name for Kristine Kathryn Rusch) for four of her five Smokey Dalton books.