Skintight

Detective Ray King is now a member of the Cincinnati Police Department, achieving a goal that he set for himself after returning from the second Iraq war, to his home neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine. Skintight is the seccond of a planned trilogy of novels focussed on the lives of poor African Americans in the center city neighborhoods of Over-the-Rhine and the West End. Both are undergoing changes as gentrification reshapes them, putting pressure on their residents and outer neighborhoods where poor blacks are being moved. Skintight follows up on some situations spilling over from the first novel, Suffer the Little Children: What happens to the black girls who were kidnapped in the first book? But Skintight also deals with the decline of family structures and the growth of drug dealing and violence in these neighborhoods in current times. King follows and tries to prevent the descent into crime by LeSean Davis, a youth whose life threatens to pattern that of his father, whom King is forced to kill in an armed robbery. Like the first, Skintight is a crime thriller that also teaches us something about modern city life.