Trestles Over Darkness

The storyline of "Trestles Over Darkness" will stir every emotion within you, causing you to love some characters and to detest others. The setting is a small town in Louisiana following World War II, and the protagonist is a 12-year-old boy named JohnnyTobin who walks to a much different drumbeat than everyone else in the community. When a black family is murdered and few others seem to care, Johnny solicits the help of a reluctant Ben Jim Cade, an elderly black man and good friend, to help him flush out the killer. They follow one false trail after another, as will readers, who will be kept guessing about the killer's identity until the novel's conclusion. Even though characters in the book are flawed and may come across as caricatures, they are as real as people in the late '40s in postwar Louisiana and in the South in general.