Trip Wire: A Cook County Mystery (PB) (2005)

Of Jackson Park, the first Cook County mystery featuring an unconventional trio of sleuths, Margo Jefferson of The New York Times said, "Charlotte Carter blends street savvy with wry urbanity and delivers a truly modern big-city crime tale." Now Carter returns with another suspenseful novel that brings the black experience to vivid life during one of the most turbulent times in American history.

It is December 1968. In the wake of assassinations and the violence of the Democratic convention in Chicago, "Summer of Love" idealism has disintegrated into suspicion and disillusion. On the city's North Side, twentyishCassandra Perry longs to be independent. She leaves the overprotective embrace of her granduncle and grandaunt, Woody ans Ivy Lisle, and moves into a multiracial commune dedicated to brotherhood and just causes. But Cassandra's search for identity plunges her into the dark side of peace, love, and unlimited freedom-even before she discovers the brutally violated bodies of the commune's most charismatic activist couple.

As Cassandra investigates with the help of Woody and Ivy, she begins to see some friends-especially one of her dearest-in a disturbing, deadly light. But when the three amateur sleuths run afoul of a police cover-up with explosive political ramifications, they face a desperate enemy determined to bury the-along with the truth.