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Snowden Wright is the author of American Pop, a Wall Street Journal WSJ+ Book of the Month and NPR Best Book of the Year. He has written for The Atlantic, SalonEsquire, and the New York Daily News, among other publications, and previously worked as a fiction reader at The New YorkerEsquire, and The Paris Review. A former Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellow at the Carson McCullers Center, Wright lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi.

 


Schedule

11:30 am to 12:30 pm

State Capitol, Senate Committee Room F

Private Eyes Wide Open: Detective Fiction

with Caroline Cleveland, Harry Hunsicker, Snowden Wright, and moderator Karen O'Connell

 

12:45 pm to 1:30 pm

Cavalier House Books Tent

Book Signing


The Queen City Detective Agency: A Novel

Following an unforgettable cast of characters and a jaded female P.I. enmeshed in a criminal conspiracy in 1980s Mississippi, The Queen City Detective Agency is a riveting, razor-sharp Southern noir that unravels the greed, corruption, and racism at the heart of the American Dream.

Meridian, Mississippi—once known as the Queen City for its status in the state—has lost much of its royal bearing by 1985. Overshadowed by more prosperous cities such as New Orleans and Atlanta, Meridian attracts less-than-legitimate businesses, including those enforced by the near-mythical Dixie Mafia. The city’s powerbrokers, wealthy white Southerners clinging to their privilege, resent any attempt at change to the old order.

Real-estate developer Randall Hubbard took advantage of Meridian’s economic decline by opening strip malls that catered to low-income families in Black neighborhoods—until he wound up at the business end of a .38 Special. Then a Dixie Mafia affiliate named Lewis “Turnip” Coogan, who claims Hubbard’s wife hired him for the hit, dies under suspicious circumstances while in custody for the murder.

Ex-cop turned private investigator Clementine Baldwin is hired by Coogan’s bereaved mother to find her son’s killer. A woman struggling with her own history growing up in Mississippi, Clem braves the Queen City’s corridors of crime as she digs into the case, opening wounds long forgotten. She soon finds herself in the crosshairs of powerful and dangerous people who manipulate the law for their own ends—and will kill anyone who threatens to reveal their secrets.