Dead of Winter

February 15, 2021
Ex-cop and philanthropist August Octavio Snow gets backed into a third case that shows once again that all Detroit politics is personal in good ways and bad. As he's dying of lymphoma, Ronaldo Ochoa is pressed to sell his Mexicantown corn and flour business, Authentico Foods, to a shadowy real estate speculator named Sloane, who claims he's fronting for billionaire developer Vic Bronson. Fearing that the buyer, whoever it is, will tear down the place and put up another ghost town of faceless residential buildings that will denature the neighborhood, Ochoa wants to sell the business to Snow--the son of a Mexican mother and Black father--for a third of the price Sloane has offered. It doesn't sound like a good idea to Snow even though he's sitting on the $12 million he was awarded in the wrongful termination suit he filed against the Detroit PD. But Snow can't turn away when Ochoa is killed and his daughter, Snow's old high school crush Jackie Ochoa, begs him for a more familiar kind of help. In no time at all, Snow's up to his neck in civic corruption that reaches as high as City Council President Lincoln Quinn, who'd been a leader in calling for Snow's dismissal. Hardball politics, blackmail, abduction, and beheading will be overlaid atop the city's susurrus of combustible racial strife. The one bright spot is Snow's reunion with German Somali ex-bartender Tatina Stadtmueller, who mitigates her outrage at every vigilante step he takes long enough to join him in a commitment ceremony. Could matrimony be next for the hometown hero who proudly announces, "I'm the Blaxican"? Ignore the tangled plot and enjoy the raucous close-ups and the joyous, unsavory overview of contemporary Detroit.

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Starred review from December 1, 2020
Ex-cop and former marine August Snow is devoting himself to real estate, renovating houses in Detroit's Mexicantown, where he grew up. The mixed-race Snow (Mexican American mother and African American father) has acquired the reputation as a defender of the neighborhood's marginalized people (Lives Laid Away, 2019), so it's inevitable that the owner of Authentico Foods, long a neighborhood landmark, would come to Snow when blackmailers attempt to take over his business. Snow's inquiries uncover an audacious scam by a billionaire real-estate mogul to build ""ghost houses,"" properties that vanish from the city's records and become safe houses for mobsters or even terrorists. With hit men in town to eliminate Snow and his friends, it's time to delve deep into the secret arsenal of Snow's gun-crazy Uncle Tom�s and put together a home-grown counterassault. Like Walter Mosley and Joe Ide, Jones builds a raucous and endearing cast of characters from his inner-city setting, fusing neighborhood camaraderie with streetwise know-how and head-banging action. This is a fine thriller in the grand hard-boiled tradition, but it's also a sensitive, multifaceted portrait of race in America. As Tatina, August's girlfriend, tells him, ""What you feel right now, August, is what every outsider feels from time to time, the weight of having cared too much for a world that cares so little.

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