Books

"Grievances," a newsroom narrative, puts the reader in a black-and-white frame of mind as Mark Ethridge resurrects familiar images comparable to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer in pursuit of justice and moral integrity.

Ethridge plops his reader into the center of the fabled hectic newsroom, complete with demanding editor and nasty, egotistical publisher. Amidst the dim, smoky atmosphere, protagonist Matt Harper launches a quest for the perfect story, full of potential to gain both widespread acclaim for the Charlotte Times and a Pulitzer Prize.

Even though it’s been decades since integration, Harper reopens a scar from the past to examine the never-investigated Hirtsboro, S.C., shooting death of Wallace Sampson, a 13-year-old black boy. Along with Brad Hall, son of an aristocratic South Carolina family, and Ronnie Bullock, an uninvited veteran reporter from the Times, Harper strives to answer: "Who pulled the trigger?" and "Why Wallace Sampson?"

As the investigators’ paths merge with colorful characters like Wallace’s mother, Etta Mae Sampson; the Reverend Clifford Grace; Brad’s father, Everette Hall; the elusive magistrate Rutledge Buchan; the ever-present policeman, Olen Pennegar; and the typical redneck, Billy Bascom, the reader is shunted from the newsroom into a fast-paced "whodunit" journey.

Ethridge’s effective use of language heightens the reader’s senses, guiding him or her to visions of simplicity and unaffectedness in the South. Anyone who has taken a Sunday afternoon drive in the country recognizes, "The road … skirted a flat field of corn stubble that stretched to the horizon." His description of Bullock excites the sense of sound: "His voice comes from the bottom of a pit all the way up through the gravel, and by the time it hits your ears it has settled into a growl." Phrases such as "(the) air conditioner mounted over the door ran loud and hard, dripping water onto the sidewalk, baptizing patrons who hesitated," stimulate multiple senses.

Conversely, although Ethridge successfully employs language to further his storyline, in exploiting technical terms like "lede," "graf," and journalistic "real estate," he causes a stranger to the newsroom some struggle for interpretation.

With Ethridge’s history as director of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting at the Charlotte Observer for investigation of the "…textile industry and PTL scandal involving Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker," he delivers believable elements in his first novel of twists and newsroom drama.

After following his fictional journalists from story idea through publication, readers should better appreciate the efforts put into each line of copy by real-life reporters and sense the private metaphorical sidebars of their challenging personal lives.

Ruth Gunter Mitchell, a native of Anniston, is a retired educator and author of the novel "Nothing But the Blood."