THE LAST KING

Sequel to Tramble’s debut, The Dying Ground (2001), continuing the story of Maceo Redfield.

In 1989, Maceo, a failed baseball powerhouse in Oakland, California, investigated the murder of his childhood best friend, Billy Crane, turned successful drug dealer. Billy’s girlfriend Felicia Bennett had been Maceo’s true love but went missing when she was the only witness to Billy’s murder. Meanwhile, Tramble deals vividly with Oakland’s spreading crack cocaine epidemic. It’s now two years later and Maceo, 25 and facially scarred, returns from the freedom of having been on the road and his own master. First off, even before going to see his beloved Granddaddy, he hits his old barbershop, ever the CNN news center of Oakland’s African-Americans, and learns that his friend Cornelius “Cotton” Knox (with whom he and Billy Crane were raised by Granddaddy and who’s now star of the Anaheim Vanguard basketball team) is being hounded about a nameless woman “bludgeoned” to death (actually, her throat was slit) in a San Francisco hotel room registered to him. But Maceo senses that his other childhood friend, Jonathan Holly Ford, is being set up to take the fall for Cotton. Well-heeled Cotton is married to Allaina, dramatically beautiful in diamond necklace, big engagement rock, and blinding white suit open to the navel. “That is not the wife of a poor man,” says Maceo’s barber, seeing her on TV. With Billy’s death, Holly has inherited Oakland’s drugbiz and was seen with Cotton while they argued with two thugs in the lobby of the San Francisco hotel, apparently about the dead girl. In Berkeley, for no reason he knows, someone saps Maceo in a parking lot. He goes out to see Cotton at his fortress in Timber Hills, where he rescues the gorgeous Sonny Boston, double-talking friend of the dead girl (and a regular Brigid O’Shaughnessy), and takes her to his pad.

Then the story dips into deep-snoop dialogue and takes off for Hammett heaven. Slow start turns into a great grabber.