DARKER THAN ANY SHADOW

Money under the mattress, a kitchen full of knives and a bathroom littered with a corpse. Is this any way to run a poetry slam?

Gearing up for the Performance Poetry Internationals, Atlanta’s Spoken Word Poetry team decides to oust Lex, reinstate Vigil and debut Rico as their newest member at a splashy dinner event. Rico, however, is scared Vigil will come after him, gun blazing, over a slight misunderstanding involving a switchblade and a run-in with cops. So he asks his best friend Tai’s boyfriend Trey, former cop and SWAT stalwart now rehabbing from a car accident that rearranged his right frontal lobe and rewired him into a human lie detector, to keep an eye open for trouble. Tai, who’s been immersed in trouble ever since inheriting her uncle’s gun shop (The Dangerous Edge of Things, 2011), tags along to the party, only to overhear a threat about missing money, then getting soaked to her undies by a faulty sprinkler system, and worst of all, discovering Lex dead on the floor of the bathroom. Naturally, Tai, who has the gumption and nosiness of Stephanie Plum, snoops enough to unearth blackmail, suspiciously placed clues, many mentions of a snake and the second dead body she’s come across in a week, this one belonging to Debbie, a poetry team gofer. Garritty, Trey’s former APD partner, tries to help out, but Tai still winds up facing a perp with a gun and needing to trust Trey’s ex-girlfriend. A must-read if you dote on romance with a touch of wry and mystery with enough suspects to fill a football stadium.