An unflinching, immersive, and incendiary portrait of injustice…
Levin crafts a layered portrait of a city and a nation confronting the realities of injustice and change in his latest novel. 1963 Detroit. When an aspiring Motown musician witnesses a white police officer kill a Black woman, it sets off a chain of events that entangles a civil rights lawyer battling illness, a drifting warehouse worker searching for purpose, and a private investigator probing a con man’s death. As their lives intersect, each is pulled deeper into a city roiling with injustice, corruption, and mounting racial tension.
Levin structures the narrative as an interwoven study of lives in collision, capturing a society at a breaking point and the consequences of choice and complicity. The inciting violence is portrayed with measured clarity, avoiding sensationalism while delivering a shock that reverberates throughout the novel. By resisting a central protagonist, Levin allows different perspectives to carry the story, giving equal weight to courtroom struggles, interior conflicts, and public pressures. Amp’s sections pulse with urgency, revealing the toll of witnessing denied injustice. Hannah’s legal fights expose institutional resistance and the slow grind of reform. David’s quieter arc traces complicity and awakening. The multiple threads occasionally dilute momentum, yet they reinforce the novel’s focus on interconnected injustice. Ultimately, the novel works as both historical portrait and moral inquiry. Levin offers no easy answers or clean moral lines, instead showing a world where systems constrain but do not absolve, and where courage exists alongside complicity and indifference.
Measured and haunting, this is a story that lingers long after the final page.
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Poison Toe Press
ISBN 79-8-9877929-3-3
Coming soon
