Livonia | The Whitest City (Detroit Eight Series)

Two years after the biggest race riot in American history, Detroit was fast becoming one of the blackest cities in the nation. The Detroit Eights knew it was time for their token whites, Maggie and Sam Tervo, to 'move behind enemy lines' and infiltrate the burbs.On the day the Tervos pulled their U-Haul over a gravel driveway off Six Mile Road, Maggie had the sensation they’d stumbled upon a town wiped out by a nuclear accident. Livonia. The stillness seemed to take oxygen out of the air.Behind picket fences, beneath a sheath of quiet civility, Maggie and Sam begin to uncover the sinister underbelly—violence, corruption, oppression and racial hysteria. Power brokers crop up everywhere. They wear suits, neatly pressed aprons, hold respectable jobs, host fundraisers and move unseen in polite society. Amid the freshly painted houses and carefully groomed lawns, the Tervos find themselves embroiled in the apartheid of fear and the high-stakes dismantling of Detroit. Racism might have been the match, but the fire looks more like greed as mysteries unwind. The mafia’s calling card is everywhere. The cops, neighbors and Women’s League of Livonia are less than welcoming. What about the Eights? Maggie’s missing French-Canadian radical, activist parents, or their patron Jacques? Where do they fall within the tremor of underground forces between darkness and light?