Frank S. Joseph’s novel TO DO JUSTICE, the third in his Chicago trilogy, is a remarkable accomplishment. Set in the Windy City during the mid-1960s, and playing out against the backdrop of the riots that did so much to shape the inner-city experiences of many people across America at that time, the book tells the story of Pinkie, a mixed-race child trying to discover the identity of her white mother. Drawing on his own experiences as a reporter and an intimate knowledge of Chicago in the 1960s, Joseph conjures the febrile atmosphere of the times with considerable elan.

Joseph has a steely grasp of narrative, flitting between the perspectives of the two protagonists, Pinkie and Mollie—both trenchant in their views in their own ways—with ease. The latter, a white reporter with the Associated Press, ventures to the West Side (at that time composed largely of Black Latino families) to cover the riots. In so doing, she happens across Nizzie, an older Black woman who is doubled over with a disability and advocates for those in her precinct with aplomb.

The decision to relate Pinkie’s and Mollie’s stories in the first person lends the whole an immediacy and verve it would have otherwise lacked. As does the presence of Martin Luther King Jr., “that Atlanta preacher,” who in the novel (as in real life) moved to Chicago’s West Side in 1966. The civil rights movement runs through the novel like a mains cable: its hopes and aspirations, the tension it embodied reflected in the storefront churches and the signs reading “NEGRO OWNED” in the windows of Black businesses. Events such as the infamous Marquette Park march of August 1966, in which King was intimately involved (and took a stone to the head for his troubles), are recounted in vivid detail. Mollie, consigned to a news desk for the major event in an organization riddled with casual sexism, witnesses the march vicariously through the just-arrived photos of a press photographer in a curious evocation of the virtual attendance—the virtual witnessing—that is commonplace today.

Though Pinkie’s travails form the crux of the novel, Joseph’s wider achievement is imbuing the period with an urgency that resonates today more than ever. During a time when social inequalities are at the forefront of national politics, TO DO JUSTICE carries a remarkable rhetorical weight.

A brilliantly evocative story of mid-1960s Chicago, Frank S. Joseph’s TO DO JUSTICE brims with interest for readers of all types.

~Craig Jones for IndieReader