African American Crime

Persia Chandler has managed to get her life back on track. Things are calm at home, she's preparing to leave for college, and she is even feeling confident enough to start dating again. More importantly, she's drug free and plans to stay that way - until Chucky slithers back into her life. He's determined to make Persia his again, and he isn't willing to take no for an answer. When trying to woo her doesn't work, Chucky plays hardball and gives Persia an ultimatum: go along with his latest twisted plot, or have her junkie past exposed to the new man in her life, Philadelphia Eagles rookie quarterback, Vaughn Tate.

Trouble comes in threes... One doomed love affair after another has made lovely Alex Walton swear off men. Now, she's determined to try something that maybe she can succeed at: a writing career. Little does she know that a chance meeting with a strikingly handsome stranger, a mysterious obelisk...

What elevates teaching my mother how to give birth, what gives the poems their disturbing brilliance, is Warsan Shire's ability to give simple, beautiful eloquence to the veiled world where sensuality lives in the dominant narrative of Islam; reclaiming the more nuanced truths of earlier times -...

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEY’S WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION From Attica Locke, a writer and producer of FOX’s Empire, this sophisticated thriller sees lawyer Jay Porter—hero of her bestseller Black Water Rising—return to fight one last case, only to become embroiled in a dangerous game of...

Walter Mosley’s indelible detective Easy Rawlins is back, with a new detective agency and a new mystery to solve. Picking up where his last adventures in Rose Gold left off in L.A. in the late 1960s, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins finds his life in transition. He’s ready—finally—to...

An irresistible story of love and death, this Easy Rawlins mystery takes place during the devastating 1965 Watts riots. Easy's hunt for a killer reveals a new city emerging from the ashes -- and a new life for Easy and his friends...

The “riveting”* true story of the fiery summer of 1970, which would forever transform the town of Oxford, North Carolina—a classic portrait of the fight for civil rights in the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird *Chicago Tribune On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old...

At the age of nine, Issac J. Bailey saw his hero, his eldest brother, taken away in handcuffs, not to return from prison for thirty-two years. Bailey tells the story of their relationship and of his experience living in a family suffering guilt and shame. Drawing on sociological research as well as his expertise as a journalist, he seeks to answer the crucial question of why Moochie and many other young black men - including half of the ten boys in his own family - end up in the criminal justice system. What role did poverty, race, and faith play? What effect did living in the South, in the Bible Belt, have?

“A moving and beautifully crafted memoir.”—SCOTT TUROW “A daring act of justified defiance.”—SHAKA SENGHOR “Nothing less than heroic.”—JOHN GRISHAM He was seventeen when an all-white jury sentenced him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now a pioneering lawyer, he...

Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics - and their impact on people of color - are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime.

In the early 20th century, most African Americans still lived in the South, disenfranchised, impoverished, terrorized by white violence, and denied the basic rights of citizenship. As the Democrats swept into the White House on a wave of black defectors from the Party of Lincoln, a group of...

When Harlem gets off on a murder charge due to insanity, the asylum he’s sent to feels worse than death, with one exception: the beautiful Nurse Daphane. As their relationship grows, so do the stakes: She has the ability to help him escape, and he has the ability to set her free from her abusive relationship. Yet Harlem has one big secret: He was perfectly sane when he committed his crime. But in the end, Daphane’s own secret may be the deadliest of all....

In this thrilling 1950s noir, when a beautiful woman comes into Paris Minton’s life, everything starts falling apart—leaving him no choice but to ask Fearless Jones for help. Mosley returns to mysteries at last with his most engaging hero since Easy Rawlins. When Paris Minton meets a...

“Super cinematic and every bit as Agatha Christie-esque as its sounds... ifyou like murder mysteries, pick this one up!” -Emily Henry, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers Named A Most Anticipated Mystery of Summer by Betches, Essence, Crime Reads and more! The glittering...

A smash debut novel from rising star Yasmin Angoe, Her Name Is Knight features an elite assassin heroine on a mission to topple a human trafficking ring and avenge her family....

"Narrators Shayna Small and Neil Shah transport listeners to 1940s New York in this dark fantasy set against a backdrop of racial tension and brewing war...Both narrators also excel at a range of accents, making this audiobook a fully immersive experience." -- AudioFile Magazine The dangerous...

Two opposites. Undeniable attraction. Three mobsters. An offer they can’t refuse. It sounds like trouble as Jackson Jones and Mackenzie Cunningham, reluctant partners and two of the best private investigators in Los Angeles, return to solve their most dangerous case yet. Jackson Jones and...

The inspiring story of a Black doctor who was deeply affected by the violence that plagued his Brooklyn childhood and later dedicated himself to addressing trauma and violence as public health issues Rob Gore first encountered violence when he was beaten and robbed as a 10-year old; it was...

When two estranged sisters inherit a home possessed by the horrors of its dark past, they must work together to survive in this viscerally chilling Southern gothic novel from the critically acclaimed author of This Cursed House. Do not go into the attic, the note warned. But that’s exactly...

Jamie MacKenzie was my light in a childhood of captivity—until his clan ripped him away and left me in the dark. Now, he's back. No longer a boy, but a battle-hardened ex-Marine, armed with vengeance and regrets. He says he’ll burn the world to the ground to free me—even if I fight him every step of the way. But I’m not just haunted by my past… I belong to a ruthless Bratva tsar who branded me as his. And he won’t let me go without a war.