Ave Blue

Rating:
Summary: -Editor's Note-
Review: Nothing in the background of Colin Taylor, a serious young black singer studying for a career in opera, could have prepared him for meeting and falling in love with Ave Blue, a street-smart single mother whose personal agenda includes revenge upon two notorious police detectives, tried--but exonerated--in the shooting death of Ave's older brother Tamar, a suspected criminal.
In Stephen Burrell's noir novel of inner-city Boston in 1971, incendiary relationships propel the action, and as the settings shift from bedroom to family room to courtroom, the denouement erupts in a cause celebre that shakes presumptions of guilt and innocence.
A story of obsession, self-sacrifice, and ultimate redemption, this novel can speak to any reader imparting something significant and valuable.

Rating:
Summary: Action packed, very moving, realistic...
Review: This novel is an excellent portrayal of life in Boston's black neighborhood in the 70's and the dramatic interaction between a young black couple, two corrupt policemen, and the jaundiced Criminal Justice System. Once you start reading, you will find it difficult to put the book down. Passion, crime, drugs, murder, all are interwoven in the story.

Innocently enough, it all starts with a young black man set on a promising career in the opera, and in love with a beautiful black woman. We have two murders in the book: a young man and a corrupt policeman - both black! The reader finds himself / herself thrown into the deep end of the underworld of Boston's ghettoes, the docks, the jails, the courtrooms, the prisons...

What follows then, is an extended dialogue. Through the eyes of the hero, the author delves deep to examine a wide area of subjects in the Black American struggle experience towards liberation from slavery days to the present and searches to find a way of real freedom for black people. Pan Africanism, heavily investing in Africa, creating some form of Black International Brotherhood is all examined.

Ultimately, however, the hero finds he is unable to escape the prison walls of a narrow cell, and must await his sad fate - the fate of many black American young men born in the ghettoes, and condemned to waste away in prisons, and even end up in the electric chair. This is a riveting book, and I highly recommend it to all readers