Darktown

Critics Review

• A brilliant blending of crime, mystery, and American history. Terrific entertainment.

  Stephen King

• Superb

  Ken Follett

• Mullen blends the classic ingredients of det-fic noir with a well-researched and searing portrayal of pre-civil rights racial division. Magnificent and shocking

  Sunday Times

• One incendiary image ignites the next in this highly combustible procedural, set in the city’s rigidly segregated black neighborhoods during the pre-civil-rights era and written with a ferocious passion that’ll knock the wind out of you.

  New York Times

• Fascinating, grim and unsettling, this is a story of violent and ingrained racism, political corruption, conspiracy and almost unbearable psychological pressure

  Guardian

• A terrific story that raises issues that have not vanished.

  The Times

• From the very first page of Darktown, I was stunned, mesmerized, and instantly a huge fan of Tom Mullen. Beyond the history and the thrilling mystery, the book’s soul lies in the burgeoning partnership (and dare I say friendship) at the center of the book. It’s a reminder of the ties that cut across race in America. There is nothing I love more in a book than hope.

  Attica Locke, author of Black Water Rising

• A complicated crime fiction that melds an intense plot with fully realized characters

  Daily Mail

• A fine, unflinching example of the increasingly widespread use of crime fiction to explore social issues; its plot is gripping

  The Economist

• Fine Southern storytelling meets hard-boiled crime in a tale that connects an overlooked chapter of history to our own continuing struggles with race today

  Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain

• This page-turner reads like the best of James Ellroy

  Publishers Weekly

• With a masterly sense of place, it shines a light on an uncomfortable period of American race relations which mirrors the struggles it still faces today, making it both shocking and deeply relevant

  Express

• Mullen is skilled at bringing the past to life, both socially and visually . . . fans of well-written literary thrillers will want this expert example

  Library Journal

• I LOVED Darktown. It just grabbed and dragged me into such a brutal and little-known past. An ambitious and original tale of murder where the heat and brutality rise off the page in a cruel and divided city

  Dreda Say Mitchell

• Mullen is a wonderful architect of intersecting plotlines and unexpected answers . . . Compelling works of fiction such as Mullen’s walk a fine line between art that reminds us of horrors past and art that trades on them with pieces too unfinished to play with

  Washington Post

• Gripping . . . melds an intense plot with fully realised characters.

  Associated Press

• A novel that couldn’t be timelier.

  O Magazine

• A hard-boiled masterpiece . . brutal, harrowing, full of anger yet atmospheric, compelling and layered with hope. A hard as nails gem.

  Weekend Sport

• A gritty, beautifully written police procedural doubling as a searing indictment of the racial tensions that then and now bedevil American society

  Irish Independent

• Extremely evocative in bringing the pre-civil rights South to life

  Booklist

• Darktown is also immensely successful as both a thriller and a historical novel

  Morning Star

• This socially resonant and morally complex literary thriller is a vivid, smart, intricately plotted saga exploring race, law enforcement, and the uneven scales of justice. It is a book to make you think.

  Crime Review

• Sudden violence and a seeping sense of unease are leavened with glimpses of light; Darktown feels like a state of mind as much as a place, fighting for better times to come.

  North and South Magazine