About the Book
Richard Allen, a composer, and his wife Keisha Johnson, a historian, are happily married and raising two bi-racial teenagers in 2019 when they become a grim statistic: one of Chicago's 510 families to lose a close relative to murder that year. In her devastating grief, Keisha finds a lifeline -- searching for the biological father she never knew. That search leads her into the dark history of police relations with Black people in Philadelphia in the late Seventies and Eighties. It also leads her to her birth father's Jamaican-American family. Dark Crossings is a novel of loss, redemption, and family in today's United States.
About the Author :
Gretchen Eick collects people and their experiences, savoring and learning from the stories they tell her that stimulate her creativity. Since 2015 she has had five novels published as well as a prize-winning history/biography, They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans' Story (2020). A world traveler, she lived in Sierra Leone, Africa, and Latvia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Europe, teaching 2017-2020 at a Muslim university in Mostar. She was awarded Prose Writer of the Year 2021 by the Kansas Authors Club.
Review :
Gretchen Cassel Eick is a noted scholar, a historian, a talented and award-winning writer, and a person of conscience. In her latest book, Dark Crossings, Dr. Eick has crafted a riveting and rich story of love, family, and accomplishment with a dark overlay of grief and violence. This is a compelling story of lives connected by homicide in metropolitan Chicago in 2019.
Ted D. Ayres, Vice President and General Counsel Emeritus, Wichita State University, host of Inside the Cover on PBS Kansas. Eick is an expert storyteller. The storyline is rich, and her characters resist caricature and resonate. The backdrop penetrates so powerfully in part because it is so exquisitely designed by a trained and observant historian familiar with the era (1960s-2020) and what that era created as well as what it left behind. You will lose yourself in the story.
Mark McCormick, Deputy Director for Strategic Initiatives, ACLU Kansas, author of Some Were Paupers, Some Were Kings: Dispatches from Kansas. In her latest novel, Dark Crossings, Gretchen Eick weaves historic facts and fictional truths into a family tapestry ripped apart by a brutal, random tragedy. Readers will empathize with complex characters who struggle to make sense of it all. Eick displays her strengths as a historian and talented writer to explore themes of violence, racial discord, racial harmony, and, ultimately, enduring love. Dark Crossings is a page-turner that speaks to all of us longing for assurance in these uncertain times.
Michael D. Graves, prize-winning novelist and author of Shadows and Sorrows, a Pete Stone mystery.Dark Crossings features mystery, intrigue, and suspense tightly woven in a fictional fabric that leads the main character into 1970s and 1980s Philadelphia to the MOVE movement to discover her unknown father and his family. Gretchen Eick highlights with sensitivity the internal and external tensions of race, class and culture within an interracial family faced with societal trauma. Dark Crossings' characters keep readers guessing while also serving as a stark reminder of the tragic events surrounding MOVE.
Reginald D. Jarrell, professor of communications, lawyer, clergyperson, and author of 31 Days (Nights): Memoir of Living Black in America and Wings.
As a trauma counsellor who works with people affected by homicide, I look for realism, honesty, growth, and a unique quality such as a lovable quirkiness in characters. The characters in Dark Crossings ring true in their mannerisms, inner dialogues, interactions with loved ones, and self. Eick uses an unusual, highly effective way of connecting a reader with her characters. Dark Crossings is a brilliantly woven blend of lives, family connections, and history.
Ronda Miller, life coach, teacher, poet, author of MoonStain, WaterSigns, Winds of Time, Going Home, I Love the Child,
