Through this blogger, Rebekah sees a handwritten letter from a convict named DeShawn Perkins who insists he was wrongfully convicted of slaughtering a black Crown Heights family in the summer of 1992. Rebekah’s hope that somebody, somewhere in this city must be doing real journalism is consummated when she meets a Brooklyn-based blogger who closely tracks every homicide in the five boroughs. Hard-bitten tabloid reporter Rebekah Roberts returns to investigate a decades-old triple murder case in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, finding not only a potential wrongful conviction, but also some disquieting revelations close to her own home in “Conviction” by Julia Dahl.ĭespite her admirable track record for thawing cold murder cases, Roberts is still stringing for the bottom-feeding New York Tribune, camping outside a movie mogul’s Tribeca apartment building one day and haranguing a Kings County DA candidate about missed child support the next. Malcolm must treat Elle as less than human in front of others while convincing her in private that he values her as highly as any white woman. Little by little Malcolm wins her over, but the painful racial dynamics around them threaten to poison their relationship. Malcolm is a skilled spy and a good person, but Elle has a hard time bringing herself to trust a glib and charming white man whose job requires him to be a gifted liar.

But her careful work is thrown into disarray by the arrival of Malcolm McCall, a detective in the Pinkerton network who is posing as a Confederate soldier paying social visits to the household where Elle works.

Her “masters” are living the high life in spite of a punishing Union blockade that’s causing widespread suffering and starvation in Richmond, Virginia.Įlle’s photographic memory makes her extremely valuable to the Loyal League, a network of black spies working to undermine the Confederacy. A spy posing as a slave in Civil War Virginia risks her own life and the outcome of the war by falling in love with a fellow spy of another race in Alyssa Cole’s “An Extraordinary Union.”Īfter being freed from slavery as a child, Ellen “Elle” Burns has one purpose: She is “going to help destroy the Confederacy.” But to do that, she has to do something she never imagined possible - pose as an enslaved woman on loan to a family of spoiled whites.

An extraordinary union