Blood on the Roses

Book excerpt: In 1955, at the height of alarm over the Emmett Till murder in Mississippi and after the Supreme Court ruling against school segregation, Associated Press reporter Rachel Feigen travels from Baltimore to Tennessee to report on a missing person case. Guy Saillot's last contact with his family was a postcard from the Tennessee Bend Motel, a seedy establishment situated on beautiful Cherokee Lake. But they have no record he was ever a guest. As the investigation deepens, Feigen has problems of her own when three local extremists decide to teach a lesson to the "uppity Jewish girl" from the North who's poking around in things that are none of her concern. But events in the Tennessee Bend Motel's room number 10 don't turn out exactly as they'd planned. This frank and honest story does justice to its superb Southern setting, capturing both the engaging qualities of the Southern people, and the terrible acts of discrimination and racism carried out by a few.