ANYWHERE YOU RUN

Two sisters find danger when they try to run from their secrets in the civil rights–era South.

Violet Richards is in trouble. As a young Black woman in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, she knows she’s courting danger by dating a White man, a rich man’s son she doesn’t really love. Then another White man rapes her. The police don’t care. When the rapist threatens her again, she kills him and goes on the run, unknowingly taking something of her boyfriend’s that turns out to be a powder keg. Violet’s younger sister, Marigold, also has a boyfriend she doesn’t love, and a secret lover as well. The lover abandons her when she tells him she’s pregnant, just about the time police come to the family home looking for Violet. Marigold sees little reason to stay in Jackson—the oldest Richards sister, Rose, died years before in an accident, and both of their parents have died recently. So Marigold gives in to her boyfriend’s marriage proposal and plan to move to Cleveland. Neither sister’s escape goes as expected, especially after Violet’s abandoned beau hires a man named Mercer Buggs to find her. Buggs is an inept detective, but he manages to put both Violet and Marigold in mortal danger. As their stories converge in the small town of Chillicothe, Georgia, Morris builds the tension, alternating the narrative among Violet, Marigold, and Buggs. She deftly ties the sisters’ situation to a real-life tragedy of the civil rights movement—the murders of Freedom Summer volunteers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—and to the inherent violence of the racism behind it. Despite a somewhat rushed ending, this thriller offers complex characters and a well-crafted portrait of time and place.

Tense plotting and an authentic historical setting enhance a thriller about racial violence.