THEY CAN'T TAKE YOUR NAME

The daughter of a convicted killer joins forces with the new owner of a historic Denver nightclub to clear her father’s name.

Langston Brown is on death row in Stratling Correctional Facility for the Mother’s Day Massacre, a years-ago bank robbery that turned lethal. The evidence is overwhelming—except for the minor detail that Langston is Black and all the witnesses to the crime said the perp was White. Armed with that little-publicized discrepancy, Brown’s daughter, Liza, leaves Juilliard and enrolls in law school with the goal of vindicating her father. Returning to Five Points, Denver’s Black neighborhood, she’s hired by Eli Stone on the spur of the moment to manage The Roz, the jazz club Eli bought and plans to reopen in hopes of recovering from the death of his beloved wife, Antoinette. The forces arrayed against the pair are formidable. Detective Sean Slager, the Black cop who made the case against Langston, is so determined to protect his community from what he sees as bad apples that he’s willing to plant evidence against anyone he thinks guilty. The Colorado governor, learning that the state’s store of the chemicals it uses in lethal injections is rapidly approaching its expiration date, announces that he’s dramatically accelerating the schedule of executions to squeeze them all in under the deadline. The judge hearing Langston’s appeal is manifestly unsympathetic, and a crucial piece of evidence has gone missing. All of this may sound familiar, but Justice, who’s clearly more invested in his characters than his plot, and more invested in an anatomy of the racial injustices baked into the justice system than either, develops the ticking-clock story in ways that will surprise most readers.

A soulful study of dreams deferred wrapped up, not always convincingly, in the trappings of a thriller.