LITTLE BLACK GIRL LOST 2

As a follow-up to his bestselling Little Black Girl Lost, Keith Lee Johnson takes back into the life of Johnnie Wise, a stunning 15-year-old whose beauty is so seductive it sparked a race riot in New Orleans. Now, the riot is over, the National Guard has left, and life can begin to return to normal in the black-owned Sable Parish.

For Johnnie, though, there is still some unfinished business. She has made it her mission to get to know the white side of her family, the Beauregards, and takes a job as a maid in their home, watching quietly to learn what really goes on behind the walls of their stately home. What she sees is more than she expected.

Outside of work, Johnnie is determined to win back the love of her life, Lucas Matthews, but first she must convince him that the night she spent with the ruthless crime boss Napoleon Bentley meant nothing to her. To Bentley, however, the night was unforgettable, and he will stop at nothing to have Johnnie to himself. He has set the wheels in motion to take over the New Orleans Mob, with Johnnie by his side as his willing concubine.

Keith Lee Johnson weaves an intriguing tale of love, lust, deception and power, all against the backdrop of a racially troubled 1950’s New Orleans. Johnnie Wise is a young woman readers won’t soon forget.

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LITTLE BLACK GIRL LOST by Keith Lee Johnson

Johnnie Wise was just fifteen years old when her mother sold her virginity to an unscrupulous white insurance man named Earl Shamus. Stunningly beautiful, with long naturally wavy hair, she possessed the voluptuous body of a thirty-year-old woman. Her skin was the color of brown sugar. Johnnie had heard about Earl Shamus and his escapades among the poor black women in New Orleans. But what she didn’t know what that Shamus had quietly made several of the girls in their neighborhood his reluctant concubines when their youthful bodies ripened – she was next.

Enter 1950’s New Orleans, a world of betrayal, envy, lust and murder, where everyone has ulterior motives. Take a peek at Johnnie Wise, a 15-year-old girl, being pursued by ruthless crime boss, Napoleon Bentley, who will stop at nothing to have this young beauty. Little Girl Lost will shock you right up to the very end with its revealing truths.

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RUN MAN RUN by Chester Himes

The author of Cotton Comes to Harlem offers here his most dramatic and thrilling novel. A white undercover cop vents his rage and starts a cycle of violence from which there is no escape.

Walker, one of New York’s embittered policemen, is vicious when drunk. Staggering into a restaurant on a freezing day, he kills two black workers “because they were there,” and pursues a third who witnessed the murders in one of the most suspenseful chases ever put on paper.

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LOST ANGELES by Odie Hawkins

In the post-Watts Rebellion 1970s, Chester L. Simmons takes up the study of Korean martial arts – hapkido and tae kwan do – and finds it easier to understand than the Korean-American shopkeepers catering to African Americans in South Central “El-A.” As he attempts to understand the racial animosities between blacks and Koreans, author Odie Hawkins, with his special blend of wry humor, incisiveness, and sensitivity, takes his alter ego Simmons through a series of romances with women of various colors (including one unique arrangement with three brown beauties in Frisco) and a series of misadventures writing movie and television scripts for Hollywood studios. Odie Hawkins is again writing in top form.

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THEM by Nathan McCall

The author of the bestselling memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler presents a profound debut novel – in the tradition of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – that captures the dynamics of class and race in today’s urban integrated communities.

Nathan McCall’s novel Them tells a compelling story set in a downtown Atlanta neighborhood known for its main street, Auburn Avenue, which was once regarded as the “richest Negro street in the world.”

The story centers on Barlowe Reed, a single, fortysomething African American who rents a ramshackle house on Randolph Street, just a stone’s throw from the historic birth home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Barlowe, who works as a printer, otherwise passes the time reading and hanging out with other men at the corner store. He shares his home and loner existence with a streetwise, twentysomething nephew who is struggling to get his troubled life back on track.

When Sean and Sandy Gilmore, a young white couple, move in next door, Barlowe and Sandy develop a reluctant, complex friendship as they hold probing – often frustrating – conversations over the backyard fence.

Members of both households, and their neighbors as well, try to go about their business, tending to their homes and jobs. However, fear and suspicion build – and clashes ensue – with each passing day, as more and more whites move in and make changes and once familiar people and places disappear.

Using a blend of superbly developed characters in a story that captures the essence of this country’s struggles with the unsettling realities of gentrification, McCall has produced a truly great American novel.

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