In His Father’s Footsteps

by Enrico Downer (Author)

In 1958, Barbadian Mark Maynard learns that his philandering father has been killed in America, shot dead on a sidewalk in New York City. He rushes to New York and finds the investigation has been abandoned. No reliable witness. No plausible motive. No suspect. He vows to himself, to his family and to his God he will never return home until the murderer is caught and brought to justice either by a system of laws or by his own hands; whereupon he takes it upon himself to follow a trail of blood that ultimately leads to Birmingham in America’s racist heartland.

At the height of America’s race wars in the fifties, he is rudely awakened to a different world but he must persist in his search for the killer and, in so doing, comes face to face with an enemy that is vastly more virulent, more inhuman, more brutal than the unfairness to his race in the colonial landscape he left behind. He is now in the stark world of Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan and a whole subculture steeped in the ideology of race and hatred of the black man. He is no less despised than his African American brothers.

Mark learns of his late father’s transracial love affairs. He believes that surely they must have led to his undoing. And in the act of following in the footsteps of his father, he too becomes enmeshed in a transracial affair of his own. In a way he becomes his father and finds himself entangled in the same web of terror that entrapped them both. Will he find his father’s killer before he himself is killed? Will his father’s footsteps lead him to his own grave?