All Saints' Day

Benjamin Hume stared at the picture of the dead boy, his eyes drawn not to the innocence of the black face, but to, of all things, the crest on the boy’s sweater. It was the crest of St. Michael’s, one of St. Louis’s preeminent private schools. In All Saints’ Day, Benjamin guides his partner, Lindsay LaFollette, new to the squad and new to St. Louis, through the strata of race and class of his hometown, through the wealth of the county’s suburbs and the abject poverty of the city. As he and Lindsay investigate the murder of DeMarcus, a child-genius, Benjamin is forced to the woman he once loved as a teenager, the girl he once thought he would marry. Her son, a senior at St. Michael’s, is one of the few who seemed to have any relationship to the victim. What’s more, her son appears to be part of a secret club of students, a club that may have had something to do with DeMarcus’s death. All Saints’ Day is a novel of a once-promising city, of race and class, and of the way we fail our young women. It is a novel of a man who must confront the choices that he made and the hurt that still lingers.