1. A Mississippi Delta/Southern novel where the characters, culture and atmosphere drive the story and plot.
And
2. A thriller set in Mississippi which works with the development of a mostly true and transcendentally horrific development in warfare.
I certainly don't know whether I have succeeded or not or whether these elements will work together.
In my mind, the Mississippi story is most important. I've wrapped it around a thriller because I hope to reach people who would ordinarily _not_ pick up something that is so character and culture-based.
Brief Synopsis
When a prominent Mississippi civil rights attorney asks renowned neurosurgeon Bradford Stone to help her save the life of a white racist condemned to death for the cold case murder of a black man, he has no idea that he is about to be dragged through a deadly past he thought he had escaped once and for all.
Stone, the disinherited scion of a powerful Delta Planter family, has no premonition that he is about live through the hellish proof of William Faulkner's axiom that, "The past isn't over; it's not even past."
Set mostly in Mississippi – primarily the Delta region where the real-life gothic exceeds the most outlandish Flannery O'Connor story – Perfect Killer tells the story of a future which can never break free of the past.
The mystery is centered in the Missssippi Delta in a top-secret military project begun decades ago in a facility once housing German POWs. The program, Project Enduring Valor, is designed to create the ultimate human killing machine. For over seventy years, has sought the Holy Grail of combat medicine: a chemical compound that would turn ordinary soldiers into weapons of mass destruction, the Perfect Killers. Now, after decades of covert trial and error which have resulted in troubling side effects such as the My Lai massacre, Enduring Valor is ready to be implemented on a massive scale--despite a few troubling side-effects.
Before he knows it, Stone himself in the sights of the Project's
director, a retired general and war hero turned presidential candidate.
To get back his life, and expose the truth, Stone must struggle with
the South's racist legacy, the demons of his past and penetrate the
very heart of the lethal conspiracy.
Detailed Synopsis
When a prominent Mississippi civil rights attorney asks renowned neurosurgeon Bradford Stone to help her save the life of a white racist condemned to death for the cold case murder of a black man, he has no idea that he is about to be dragged through a deadly past he thought he had escaped once and for all.
Stone, attorney Jasmine Thompson and her lawyer daughter Jasmine, have no premonition that they are about live through the hellish proof of William Faulkner's axiom that, "The past isn't over; it's not even past."
Set mostly in Mississippi – primarily the Delta region where the real-life gothic exceeds the most outlandish Flannery O'Connor story – Perfect Killer tells the story of a future which can never break free of the past.
Brad Stone is a multi-generational native of Mississippi, the embodiment of a "Son of the Confederacy" with illustrious ancestors painted in oil, statuary in the U.S. Capitol and the scion of a powerful Delta planter family which controlled not one, but two plantations, Mossy Island and Saint's Rest. Significant parts of Stone's character and most of the remaining atmospheric renderings of Mississippi and its culture are drawn from the author's own life and experience.
Stone's grandfather was known as "The Judge" and ruled with a powerful and undisputed hand in his day.
But where The Judge had been a man shaped by his time, so too did Brad Stone become a man of his, dabbling in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. That was to become a process of alienation and disinheritance from the family wealth which began not from an awakened social consciousness, but rather from a rather prosaic act of teenage infatuation.
Stone's infatuation, however, was a mortal social sin because he had fallen for Vanessa one of the handful of black students admitted to his high school as part of token integration efforts.
Vanessa is the daughter of a professor at nearby all-black Tougaloo College, a civil rights activist and as a law school student, a legal aid firebrand. Vanessa's parents will have nothing to do with an interracial relationship between their daughter and Stone who represents the very epitome of white power.
Separated before their infatuation goes further, Vanessa goes her way and Stone joins the Army as an enlisted man, further disgracing his family who have always served as officers rather than "common" soldiers.
Over the years, Stone excels as a special forces operative but gradually tires of killing and transitions into a medic role which eventually leads him back to college, to medical school and into a financially remunerative neurosurgery practice. His first love however, is his teaching and research at UCLA into the physical processes which create the mystical phenomenon of human consciousness.
Stone has always been a rebel and this work has led him to break with scientific conformity and conclude that consciousness transcends the mere physical and biochemical processes to allow a union with God. These lead Stone on a spiritual journey which we see shaped at every turn by the influence of Southern religious culture.
His work on brain damage as it affects consciousness and the issues of free will is why Vanessa Thompson reaches out to him over a stretch of decades that Stone worked all too hard to forget.
Vanessa believes that a convicted white racist, Darryl Talmadge, has been railroaded by federal officials prosecuting cold cases from the past. The case is too neat, too complete. Her suspicions are reinforced by similar doubts by a black sheriff's deputy who was charged with re-investigating Talmadge's case.
Something suspicious is happening with connections to a very prominent former army general and hero, Clark Braxton who is the odds-on winner to win the next presidential election. Until she can unravel that connection, she wants Stone to help her in Talmadge's appeal, to keep him alive long enough to learn what he knows about Braxton. Because Talmadge clearly has some form of brain damage that prevents him from fully controlling his actions, Vanessa hopes that Stone can help her find a basis for the man's appeal.
In a public meeting in the Delta that re-ignites Stone's enduring love for Vanessa, the two embrace, but seconds later, Vanessa is shot dead by a sniper. Their embrace, however, is enough to ignite a controversy among those – black and white -- who still believe that interracial relationships are wrong.
After Vanessa’s murder, her law partner and daughter, Jasmine, picks up the case and his heart strings, so similar is she to her mother in thoughts, words, deeds and physical appearance.
Not only do the old ghosts of forbidden interracial romance some back to haunt Stone, he is further tormented by thoughts of infidelity to Camilla, his brain-dead wife, who has lived in a coma for six years, but also by the age difference between him and Jasmine.
Stone's struggle to deal with all these factors intertwine the key emotional threads which run through the book: consciousness, life after death, the endurance of love and memories, how the past never relinquishes its grip and the human arrogance which believes that finite minds can comprehend the infinite – All shaped and amplified by the Mississippi memories which will leave none of the characters alone.
Salvation through free will is the underlying motivation for all the characters in Perfect Killer: and plays out primarily in settings in the Mississippi Delta or events directed by Mississippi, past and present.
As Jasmine and Stone set out to trace the paths first trod by the late-Vanessa Thompson, the trail leads them to Mississippi, where they unearth not only evidence of the crime, but memories and living artifacts of the past which have the power to influence them as surely as the events and pressures of the present.
Perfect Killer is a thriller which is as much of Mississippi as it is in Mississippi. It is told through the notes and lyrics of the blues, born as it was in the Delta. The atmosphere of Perfect Killer is a present day lodged between the rocks of the past and present, of humidity, emotional bayous and shadows that come from demons thought long buried.