'A brilliant blending of crime, mystery, and American history. Terrific entertainment'
Stephen King on Darktown

Lightning Men follows the multi-award-nominated, highly acclaimed crime debut Darktown into a city on the brink of huge and violent change - and full of secrets.

Atlanta, 1950. In a divided city, crime comes home.

White officer Denny Rakestraw joins Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith from Atlanta's Negro Officer precinct to face the Klan, gangs and family warfare in their rapidly changing city.

Black families - including Smith's sister and brother-in-law - are moving into Rake's formerly all-white neighbourhood, leading Rake's brother-in-law, a proud Klansman, to launch a scheme to 'save' their streets. When those efforts leave a man dead, Rake is forced to choose between loyalty to family or the law.

Meanwhile, Boggs has outraged his preacher father by courting a domestic, whose dangerous ex-boyfriend is then released from prison. As Boggs, Smith, and their all-black precinct contend with violent drug dealers fighting for turf in new territory, their personal dramas draw them closer to the fires that threaten to consume Atlanta once again.

Praise for Thomas Mullen

'Magnificent and shocking'
Sunday Times

'Written with a ferocious passion that'll knock the wind out of you'
New York Times

About the Author
Thomas Mullen is the author of Darktown, an NPR Best Book of the Year, which has been shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, the Indies Choice Book Award, has been nominated for two Crime Writers Association Dagger Awards, and is being developed for television by Sony Pictures with executive producer Jamie Foxx; The Last Town on Earth, which was named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today and was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for excellence in historical fiction; The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers; and The Revisionists. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and sons.

Reviews
A brilliant blending of crime, mystery, and American history. Terrific entertainment. * Stephen King *
Black vs. White doesn't begin to cover the complexity of the diverse relationships in this sharply observed novel * New York Times *
Superb * Ken Follett *
Violent, compassionate and brilliant. * Sunday Times (Crime Club) *
Today's finest exemplar of the white-writer-black-cop tradition. Few other crime writers are as adept . . . social history made riveting * Sunday Times *
Mullen again brilliantly combines a suspenseful plot with a searing look at a racist South * Publishers Weekly *
Morally complex and boasting more finely drawn characters, this outstanding follow-up to Darktown deepens Mullen's portrait of pre-civil rights America and deserves a place on every suspense reader's list. * Library Journal *
Behind an engaging story and challenging action for the protagonists, the friction between the races is ever at the forefront of the story, and the detail is at times jaw-dropping. * Crime Review *
A complicated crime fiction that melds an intense plot with fully realized characters * Daily Mail *


Awards
Long-listed for CWA Historical Dagger 2018 (UK).



Book Information
ISBN 9781408710616
Author Thomas Mullen
Format Paperback
Page Count 384
Imprint Little, Brown
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Weight(grams) 502g
Dimensions(mm) 231mm * 153mm * 28mm