THE DYING GROUND

Another from Villard’s new Strivers Row imprint for African-American fiction (see Brown, above), this “hip-hop noir” in the Walter Mosley/Easy Rawlins tradition follows failed basketball powerhouse Maceo Redfield as he investigates the murder of Billy Crane, his childhood best friend turned drug dealer in 1989 Oakland, California. As he plums the underground drug world in search of answers (and Billy’s missing girlfriend—Maceo’s true love), Maceo will near the brink during that last, dyspeptic summer of the ’80s, when crack cocaine, AIDS, and George Bush seemed to point to so much gone so wrong.