If the Moon Had Willow Trees

The award-winning author of The Otherness Factor takes us to Detroit two days after Detroit cops raid a blind pig (speakeasy) inciting the biggest race riot in American history. That morning Maggie Soulier wakes to a deejay’s cry for ‘anyone left in the city’ to hustle pop to police sweltering at highway checkpoints leading into the firestorm. Maggie’s not a hippie chick looking for a cause, she’s the daughter of notorious French Canadian secessionist radicals who disappeared without a trace. A grad student on a visa, Maggie covers absences at a pizzeria to support her stateside civil rights work. Delivering soft drinks to keep armed men from having a meltdown sounded simple. That was before she met Sam Tervo on the wrong side of a gun–before she offered him a Coke, before shared laughter ricocheted against shrieking sirens and a darkening sky.

Sam, a fierce human rights advocate, thinks he’s being targeted by mafia types who want something; the question is what. More and more he relies on his friend Clyde Webster, a black civil rights leader and Maggie’s co-worker, to guide him through this underworld. Cold sober in the ash, soot and rubble, Clyde pulls together The Eights: eight working-poor, part-time activists, to curb white flight and integrate the burbs.

With the intrigue, corruption, brutality and bigotry, The Eights experience the love, laughter, irony and self-reflection of blacks and whites redefining friendship and transforming the world with pocket change.