E. Dolores Johnson Knihy

Fearful of prison time--or lynching--for violating Indiana's anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's black father and white mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or a victim of human trafficking. When Johnson was born, social norms and her government-issued birth certificate said she was Negro, nullifying her mother's white blood in her identity. As an African American, she withstood the advice of a high school counselor who said that blacks don't go to college by graduating from Harvard. Then, as a code-switching business executive feeling too far from her black roots, she searched her father's black genealogy. Johnson was amazed to suddenly realize that her mother's whole white side was--and always had been--missing. When confronted, her mother's decades-old secret spilled out. Despite her parents' crippling and well-founded fears of rejection and reprisals, and her black militant brother's accusation that she was a race traitor, Johnson went searching for the white family who did not know she existed. When she found them, it's not just their shock and her mama's shame that have to be overcome, but her own fraught experiences with whites.

"Dolores Johnson writes with wit and panache. I love her sense of humor."---Diane Mott Davidson, author of Double ShotIn this latest installment of Dolores Johnson's beloved dry-cleaning sleuth series, Mandy Dyer notices the new and improved appearance of her customer Ardith Brewster. The young woman has met a new but mysterious boyfriend at Dyer Cleaners' open house party. When Ardith, a loan officer at a bank, turns up dead a couple days later, Mandy suspects the worst. The only clue she has to go on is a mention of the unknown boyfriend's sharp sense of style---so different from Ardith's suit-and-tie co-workers. Mandy's curiosity turns to horror when she finds that the victim in a similar killing had been in the cleaners shortly before her death, and what's more, that the two women bore a striking resemblance to each other.With only clothes for clues and the less-than-reliable help of her incorrigible employee, Betty the Bag Lady, Mandy presses on with her investigation in a race to find the killer before he has a chance to close out her career permanently.