Announcing a New Crime Novel from Award-Winning Journalist Bill Fletcher, Jr.

In 1970, a sniper’s bullet shocks the sleepy Cape Cod village of Osterville. David Gomes, a young reporter for the Cape & Islands Gazette covers the story, thinking his reporting might lead to a job with a major metropolitan newspaper. With protests against the Viet Nam war and the rise of the Black Panthers roiling the public, the murder investigation becomes deeply personal when Gomes, a Cape Verdean American, encounters the smoldering racial antagonism between the descendants of Cape Verde and African-Americans, as well as the deep-seated hatred toward all people of African descent among members of the white community.

Gomes soon learns that investigating a murder can put him in the cross-hairs of a cold-blooded killer. It’s a dangerous place for the young reporter as he peels away layers of family history in his quest to discover the motive behind a savage act of murder, and comes to understand a complicated, contradictory history of his own people.

Set within a Cape Verdean American community undergoing a transformation of its own consciousness, Fletcher’s crime novel dives deep into two timely questions: Is revenge ever a moral form of justice, and when does silence become complicity as criminal acts are committed before your own eyes?

“The Man Who Fell From the Sky”
Page count: 350 pages
Publisher: Hard Ball Press
Distributor: Ingram