THE BESSIE BLUE KILLER

In his hardcover debut, International Surety claims agent Hobart Lindsey, sent to ride herd on an umbrella policy for the filming of Bessie Blue, a film about black airmen in WW II, finds the production halted by producer Ina Chandler and technical advisor Lawton Crump's discovery of dead janitor Leroy McKinney. As Lindsey keeps explaining to everybody from his black girlfriend Sgt. Marvia Plum (Berkeley PD) to Oakland Homicide Lt. High, he's only trying to save the company's money, not investigate any murders—but after a trip to McKinney's neighborhood tavern erupts in more murder, there's no way for him to avoid a trip to McKinney's childhood home in Reserve, Louisiana—where he finds that McKinney was killed in an Air Force explosion back in 1944. And there's no rest from the grip of the military past in Lindsey's home life, either, as his mother struggles to rouse herself from her fixation on 1953—the year her husband died in his own war- -and Marvia has to fight her remarried ex, now a Gulf War hero, for custody of their son. ``There's no poison in you,'' Marvia tells Lindsey, and she's right: the gentle, reluctant detective suffuses this entertaining nostalgia binge with tenderness.