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 jewgirl” 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.
Genre: FICTION / CrimeBlood on the Roses is available as an ebook, paperback, and audiobook. It was previously published through a small publisher out of Washington. When the author terminated contracts with them, we republished it (we just got the latest paperback edition out this past July). At this moment, he's hovering around 200,000 on Amazon, but we do frequent ads (one is going out tomorrow) that work well to boost sales and visibility.
Rachel Feigen was tired when she checked into the Tennessee Bend, after the long drive from Baltimore, and unsure where to begin. She already had a deep emotional attachment to this assignment and had come to face it with a sense of dread. This one did not hold much prospect for a pleasant outcome.
Not that Feigen was accustomed to happy endings. She had just spent a grueling three weeks piecing together a story on the effects of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and was left discouraged if not downright despondent by what she’d found. In the several months since the court struck down “separate but equal” as a legal basis for racial segregation in the schools, little had been done to implement the court’s decree. This was not what she had hoped to find.
Her disappointment in the outcome of the investigation pleased Bill Skyles, her editor at the Associated Press. Skyles demanded absolute impartiality when his reporters’ work went to print, but he wanted them to understand and feel the impact of their stories.
Skyles was sufficiently impressed with Feigen’s performance on the story to hand her a new assignment that he called the most important one he had. He said it could be her biggest challenge since joining the AP national reporting team and she had dug into the story just deep enough to see that he was right.
