"Rock Creek," Kilimanjaro Press, 2024

By Kevin Flynn

"Rock Creek," PUBLICATION DATE MAY 21, 2024, rises from Washington, D.C., 1952: a murder mystery, a political thriller, and a work of historical fiction that brings to life a time and place that are so distant, yet still seem so close.

It's about the nation's capital in the early 1950s: the most important city in the world at the midpoint of the American century, but at heart a small Southern town deeply divided along race and class boundaries. It's about those boundaries and what happens to people who dare to try to cross them.

It's about rebellion and protest, power and sex.

But most of all it's about two people.
Emily Rose: a beautiful Capitol Hill staffer with a tragic past, rooted in the Holocaust, from which she tries to escape but never quite can. A woman who ends up dumped and abandoned in the city's Rock Creek Park, her death raising the mystery that animates the book.

And Shane Kinnock: a homicide detective with one foot in the most refined part of town and the other in its seediest. When the book begins he's at the low point of his life and his career, still shell-shocked from war and scarred by family tragedy. He sees the prospect of redemption in Emily's story but will find that it draws him to close to insanity. In the end, it is his perseverance in solving the book's central mystery -- and finally coming to grips with the moral choices of his past -- that gives the book its enduring spirit.