North Minton, a Novel

"Into each life, a little rain must fall..." Longfellow wrote it. The Ink Spots sang it. A line in a poem, then a song lyric. But it became a central truth for one Marcus Ledbetter, only it wasn't ..".a little rain...." It was a perfect storm -- of war in the Iraqi desert, followed by the crushing loss of his wife at the hands of three men with no humanity or mercy among them. Marcus is a black man in an America which was supposed to have outgrown racial prejudice and inequality 50 years ago. Now 50, his heart broken and grieving, he leaves Dothan, Alabama and his wife's unsolved rape and murder. He wanders north, a slow journey in search of nothing more than peace and quiet, to live out his days in a solitude that he hopes will be healing, or at least a time of no more pain. What he finds in North Minton, in the rusted-out steel-mill corner of Pennsylvania, is anything but peaceful. What he does to cope with it is a story of one man's quiet strength and decency, of determination to face down a hundred evils that persist in the ragged edges of the America we want to love and honor. The men and women of North Minton are the cast of Marcus's story, each with his own dream, her own tragedy, their own triumphs and failures, casually woven into the cloth of all small towns where angels and demons cross paths on every street.