Critiques en avant-première

In the lively, but desperate world of D.C.'s underbelly, a Black homeless man must quickly learn the ropes of being a detective after a wealthy ex-government official sets him up to take the fall for a brutal crime he didn’t commit. Christopher Chambers, author of A Prayer for Deliverance and Sympathy for the Devil (NAACP Image Award nominee) brings a 21st-century take on hardboiled noir tales in SCAVENGER, a gripping thriller underscored by themes of race, homelessness, hustling, and the savagery—and salvation—of the human psyche. The novel centers on Dickie Cornish, a Black streetwise survivor living in a homeless camp near D.C.’s Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Framed for the murder of two of his closest friends and facing life in prison, Dickie crosses paths with wealthy ex-Homeland Security Secretary, Jamie Bracht. Bracht offers him a chance at a new life if Dickie can navigate an underground world to uncover a prize Bracht will stop at nothing to acquire. As Dickie searches, SCAVENGER tracks its way through an underground population of Washington, D.C., where hustlers, drug addicts, homeless, and undocumented immigrants jostle for crumbs while trying to survive. Chambers paints a portrait of D.C. from the ground up, with back-alley streetscapes, gentrification clashes, and unexpected encounters between politicians and bottom-rung natives—all set against a soundscape of patois, street Spanish, and D.C. slang. A hopeless amateur detective at first, Dickie quickly learns the ropes of being a sleuth in a cat-and-mouse game of greed, deceit, double-crossing, and murder. High Praise for SCAVENGER “Chambers comes out of the box swinging hard in this fast-moving, down-and-dirty crime novel that kicks up the tarp on the sleazy, duplicitous, double-dealing underbelly of our nation’s capital. Two thumbs up for Chambers!” —Tracy Clark, author, Borrowed Time, winner of the G.P. Putnam’s Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award “Literary cinema verite, Chambers delivers a sly, slick and twisty hardcore mystery well worth the read.” —Gary Phillips, author, Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem “SCAVENGER is as hard and unflinching as noir gets . . . Chambers delivers a voice of idiomatic, hard-won radiance.” —Louis Bayard, author, Roosevelt’s Beast and Mr. Timothy “Chris Chambers has created a wholly original character that exists in a world at once familiar but startlingly brutal.” —S. A. Cosby, author, Blacktop Wasteland