If the Moon Had Willow Trees (Detroit Eight Series)

Award-winning author of The Otherness Factor takes us to Detroit during the turbulence of the Sixties.Detroit––July 25, 1967, two days after Detroit cops raid a blind pig (speakeasy) inciting the biggest race riot in American history, Maggie Soulier wakes to a deejay's cry for 'anyone left in the city' to hustle pop to police sweltering at highway checkpoints leading into the firestorm. Maggie's not a hippie chick looking for a cause, she's the daughter of notorious French Canadian secessionist radicals who disappeared without a trace. A grad student on a visa, Maggie covers absences at a pizzeria to support her stateside civil rights work. Delivering soft drinks to keep armed men from having a meltdown sounded simple. That was before she met Sam Tervo on the wrong side of a gun––before she offered him a Coke, before shared laughter ricocheted against shrieking sirens and a darkening sky.Sam, a fierce human rights advocate, thinks he's being targeted by mafia types who want something; the question is what. More and more he relies on his friend Clyde Webster, a black civil rights leader and Maggie's co-worker, to guide him through this underworld. Cold sober in the ash, soot and rubble, Clyde pulls together The Detroit Eights: eight working-poor, part-time activists, to curb white flight and integrate the burbs. Maggie and Sam, the token whites.With the intrigue, corruption, brutality and bigotry, Maggie, Sam, Clyde and 'The Eights' experience the love, laughter, irony and self-reflection of blacks and whites redefining friendship and transforming the world with pocket change.