7 Books Published by Penknife Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

The murder mystery, One Dead Activist tosses the reader into the aftermath of police shootings. Wilson Norton, an effective activist protesting police shootings, is murdered in Chicago, and David Price is drawn into the case by his son. David’s involvement leads to him killing a Chicago police officer which makes him the target of law enforcement officers and rightwing police supporters. David’s ex-wife, Regina, gets involved, and her news reporting skills uncover secret relationships with a madam, SWAT officers, a banker, and crime bosses. No one is safe as David Price struggles to bring stability to his beloved city and his life.

The Killing Breeze is a story of societal unrest told from the point view of two main characters, opposites in a sense: one being a Black male Ph.D., the other a white female undergraduate. The unrest takes place in the fictional Falcon City; a city in America that becomes the focal point of national police killings; every time a Black person is killed by police nationally, a white officer is slain locally in Falcon city. The young white female undergraduate, Denise Thomas, makes the initial correlation. She seeks out Dr. Noble Breeze, the Ph.D., to correlate her theory. Due to the police being shot, the city is in a volatile state, tense throughout, and that tension remains through the novel generating a page turning read. Dr. Noble Breeze is in no way a typical academic; his checkered past includes psychiatric ward hospitalization, and his current life involves clandestine activities with a militarized think-tank known as the American Purist Society. The racial tension between the police, The American Purist Society, and the Black citizens of Falcon drive the novel to a climatic clash between the Black citizens, white supremacist, the military, and the police; at the center of the conflict are the national police killings. The novel is alarming in its timeliness and unsettling in the revelations of American thought; what a reader presumes will happen, doesn’t; the novel is not a cliffhanger – it drops the reader off a cliff.

Emotional Drippings is a collection of short stories about love, lust and addiction. The stories are real enough to wrap the reader in the common prose of the characters everyday lives. These lives, these characters, these situations are lived by the reader. Moments of desire, anguish, pity, joy and heart-pounding excitement flow from the page. This collection of stories reflects lives lived during these times.

This novel is about a young man accused of a crime he did not commit who is forced to flee in order to prove his innocence. He is helped by a gay Puerto Rican man he met in a bar a couple of days earlier.

A killer is stalking young women in David Price’s community, his brother has just been released from drug rehab and living with him, his ex-wife (and baby’s mama) is dating a police detective that tried to pin a murder charge on him, and his best friend has been diagnosed with heart disease. Amidst it all, the police find a young girl dead behind his house. The young girl turns out to be Ricky Brown’s niece, and once again David Price is thrown into a case that threatens his beloved Southside community and the people he loves. The investigation leads to One Dead Doctor and unpredictable changes in David’s life. This third installment of Tony Lindsay’s ‘One Dead …’ series is an edge of your seat, page-turning mystery that delivers heart-pounding reading until the last page.

‘Fat from Papa’s Head’ is a collection of short stories targeted at young adults. All of the protagonists are young African-American male teenagers and young adults. The main characters in these stories are at pivotal points in their young lives. Some of the youth are at rite-of-passage moments, and others are merely faced with decisions. This collection was composed in response to the author’s conversations with incarcerated African-American male youth. The discussions centered on reading materials, and the need and want for stories that reflected their lives. These stories are an attempt to meet that need and want.

The story of Dai Break Jones is the story of a woman with aggressive ambition born into a
man’s world. She never accepted the thought that a woman had her place. Born the only child to
the founder of one of Chicago’s largest street organizations, Dai Break Jones accepted her position
of royalty, and stood toe to toe against all foes. More Boy than Girl is Street Lit at its finest. It
is a hard core story, about a hard core world.