Smokey Dalton

Set against the backdrop of the strike and protests that will end with Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, A Dangerous Road combines the politics of race, betrayal, unexpected love, and the terrible cost of trust into a story so memorable the Mystery Writers of America chose it as one of the top five novels of the year.

On the run after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Private Investigator Smokey Dalton has settled under an assumed name in Chicago. But history won’t leave him alone. His job in security at the Chicago Hilton places him in the center of the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Worse, a killer works his South Side neighborhood. Smokey must take action, before he loses everything.

Smokey Dalton and Jimmy, the young boy he protects, have settled into a new life on Chicago’s South Side. But when Smokey gets hired to investigate the death of a black man in a local park, he realizes that the murder might not be an isolated case. The case forces Smokey to dig deeper into the area's history—and secrets. Secrets so dark, they threaten his very existence.

Smokey Dalton takes on the dangerous world of back-street abortionists in pre-Roe Chicago. Private investigator Smokey Dalton and his powerful girlfriend discover a critically injured woman in his neighbor’s apartment, and his neighbor missing. Smokey gets the woman to a nearby hospital, but the doctor won’t treat her until she tells him what happened to her.

The case starts out close to home: Daniel Kirkland never arrived at Yale for the spring semester. What at first seems like a missing persons case becomes something bigger, as Smokey delves into the heart of the anti-war movement. Gradually he realizes that he has stumbled into America’s second war of the decade: the war at home.

When the landlord at one of Sturdy Investments’ South Side properties dies alone in his apartment, Smokey Dalton agrees to investigate. He finds old human bones in the basement, along with hints of more. As he and Laura, his girlfriend and Sturdy's CEO, dig deeper, they discover secrets that could threaten them, Sturdy, and one of Chicago’s greatest institutions. Secrets worth killing for.

Private detective Smokey Dalton does his best to protect his adopted family, from his 11-year-old son Jimmy to his friends, the Grimshaws. But Smokey can’t see everything. Jimmy notices that Lacey Grimshaw—“thirteen going on trouble,” Smokey says—skips school to hang out with an adult man. Jimmy doesn’t want to tattle, but he’s worried about Lacey.

Smokey Dalton gets a call from an old friend to help transport a battered woman and her young daughter from Madison, Wisconsin, to a shelter in Chicago. When Smokey and Marvella Walker show up at the drop site, they learn that the woman is both white and a racist. She refuses to leave with them. And that’s only the beginning of their problems.

In the first week of the new decade, an emergency phone call shatters Chicago Private Detective Smokey Dalton’s hopes for a good 1970. His adopted son Jimmy and Jimmy’s best friend and cousin Keith Grimshaw need help.