South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
In pair of mysteries, racism swirls around missing girls
Haitian-American author Erin E. Adams hits the ground running in “Jackal,” her devastatingly powerful debut that delves into racism, classism, smalltown angst and friendship in a tightly focused mystery.
Even when “Jackal” veers into the realm of the paranormal, Adams keeps the story believable as it leads to its natural finale.
Haitian-American Liz Rocher reluctantly returns to her hometown of Johnstown, Pa., where she and her mother were one of the few Black families who lived in the more upscale, largely white neighborhoods. That’s because her mother was a physician who worked hard as an emergency room doctor to gain a certain status.
Liz is back for the wedding of her best friend, Mel Parker, who is white. While Mel’s racist family despises her fiancé, Garrett, because he is Black, they do love the couple’s 9-year-old daughter, Caroline. The Parkers also tolerate Liz because they believe she is not like “other” Black people in town.
When a Black child disappears during the wedding reception, Liz remembers that another Black girl disappeared in the nearby woods when she was a teenager. In helping the search for the newly missing child, Liz discovers that other Black girls have gone missing during the past two decades and the police have done little to help find them.
Adams ramps up the terror factor as Liz deals with the foreboding woods, her anxiety about being back home and dealing with racism, both overt and subtle. Some people, Liz knows, say they don’t “see color.” But “the truth,” Liz says, is “being blind to color
only makes you blind.” Adams also makes “Jackal” a journey of self-discovery as Liz learns to trust her instincts and find her “truth.”
Expert plotting coupled with multi-layered characters make “Jackal” a standout.
A new series
The challenges of policing a community of refugees and minorities who live in fear, surrounded by prejudice, are the challenges
of the Denver Police Department’s Community Response Unit, the center of this new series by critically acclaimed author Ausma Zehanat Khan. As she did in her Esa Khattak series, Khan explores a vulnerable community of outsiders who find their strengths in the bonds of family and religion in the outstanding “Blackwater Falls.”
Khan’s new series focuses on detective Inaya Rahman, a Muslim woman — “too brown for
the badge, too blue for her co-religionists” — who moved to Denver six months before. Tenacious, insightful and opinionated, Inaya is unbending in her views about how an investigation should be conducted involving vulnerable and minority groups, and she is fearless in standing up to bigots and criminals.
Inaya also doesn’t back down when it comes to her boss, Lt. Waqas Seif. The small police team is assigned to the murder of a teenage Syrian girl found in a mosque in the nearby town of Blackwater Falls.
Inaya knows the mosque well — it’s where she and her family pray — and is aware of how the members have been targeted by an anti-Muslim evangelical church and a powerful sheriff who makes no secret of his dislike of minorities.
Inaya uncovers the fact that two Somali girls also have disappeared but the sheriff refused to investigate, maintaining they were runaways despite their families’ concern. Inaya finds support from activist-attorney Areesha Adams and criminal psychologist Catalina
Hernandez, but her myriad run-ins with Waqas make her wonder whose side her boss is on.
Khan’s focus on the vagaries of community elevates “Blackwater Falls” as she shows various aspects of the refugees’ lives. Inaya is a fascinating character whose role as a police detective often is at odds with her mother’s expectations for her.
“Blackwater Falls” is the start of what should be a long-running series.