Confessions of Matthew Strong

A black woman academic, burdened by an unsupportive department chair (who is more interested in fund raising than in her research) and a troubled marriage, grows worried when a graduate student goes missing and she begins to get weird letters. A man with white supremacist beliefs wants to meet her to discuss her research into Black history. When her beloved grandmother dies suddenly back in Alabama, she returns to a state she hasn't visited in years, alienated from her family who, she feels, resent her professional success. returnreturnWhat we know is that she will be kidnapped, and when. What we don't know is why, or what it all means, or how the white supremacist who continues to harass her justifies his interest in her work. returnreturnArriving in Alabama, she learns her grandmother led a group of women in tracking a series of missing women, which might include her graduate student. She resolves to carry on the work, and makes progress right up to the kidnapping. returnreturnThe author draws on two themes - the general lack of coverage of missing Black women and the persistence of white supremacy that would like to see a return to Jim Crow if not to the establishment of a white Christian nationalist state. He adds in a character who has an ambivalent attitude toward her southern home and is struggling to find her place in the world, a man who is leading a revival of late 19th-century terrorism in the southern states with the cultural trappings of white supremacist thought, and elements of a thriller, though without the singular focus on plot or with the satisfaction of a justice-triumphant resolution. returnreturnIt's an interesting story that is not entirely comfortable with the thriller genre and its expectations, but I found it far more thoughtful and interesting than thrillers that are clearly using our history of racial violence as a plot device and an easy way to set up good guys and villains.