Hundred Dollar Bet

Tested loyalties, and love of a woman are at the heart of this well written novel by an excellent writer. It is the story of two young Black men, Hobart Grayson and Shelby Murchison whose paths cross when they win athletic scholarships to the same university. Because they are from very diverse backgrounds an unlikely friendship develops between the two during their freshman year. Their friendship continues once they graduate, behind a one hundred bet. The story unfolds against a backdrop of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and Jim Crow bigotry of the 1950's when a young Black man is kidnapped by a mob and lynched. There hadn't been a lynching in Texas since the early 1940's when a distant cousin of Hobart was accused of raping a white woman and strung up in Texarkana. When the same thing happens to nineteen-year-old Willie Eason years later, Hobart vows to achieve justice for him. The reader will not be able to put this book down until he/she knows how Hobart manages to avenge Willie's murder and what the hundred-dollar bet is all about and who is the winner.