On his first night with Detroit PD, Officer Walter O'Brien is called to a murder scene. A terrified twenty-year-old has bludgeoned her kidnapper with skill that shocks even O'Brien's veteran partner. The young woman is also a brilliant escape artist. Her bold flight from police custody makes the case impossible to solve, and, for Walter, even more impossible to forget. By the time Walter's promoted to detective, his fascination with the missing, gray-eyed...

Detroit private investigator Amos Walker is hired to recover HDTV converter boxes stolen from a retailer whose shop also does vintage resale business. Before long, the case turns old school: both a suspect and the man who lost the boxes are murdered, and Walker ends up working with both the local police and the feds.

Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparent's desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s. "In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops...

"In the waning days of the 1970s, the lives of several residents of Detroit and its affluent white suburbs are drawn together following the disappearance of yet another child. Hannah, a wife and mother, begins an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger; Mikey, a young street hustler, finds himself on an unexpected mission to rectify injustice; and then there's the child serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and elusive figure at the periphery...

Amos Walker is hired by Francis X. Lawes, a private-sector mover and shaker in Detroit politics, to prove that his wife, Paula, who disappeared under sinister circumstances more than six years ago, is dead. Francis wants to remarry without having to wait for the seven-year declaration-of-death rule to kick in. Walker's investigation is complicated by two facts: the police still consider Lawes the prime suspect, and the first-responding officer in...

"When the body of an anonymous young Hispanic woman dressed as Queen Marie Antoinette is dredged from the Detroit River, the Detroit Police Department wants the case closed out fast. Wayne County Coroner Dr. Bobby Falconi gives the woman's photo to his old pal August Snow, insisting August show it around his native Mexicantown to see if anyone recognizes her. August's good friend Elena, a prominent advocate for undocumented immigrants, recognizes...

On the corner of American Street and Joy Road, Fabiola Toussaint thought she would finally find une belle vie -- a good life. But after they leave Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Fabiola's mother is detained by U.S. immigration, leaving Fabiola to navigate her loud American cousins, Chantal, Donna, and Princess; the grittiness of Detroit's West Side; a new school; and a surprising romance, all on her own. Just as she finds her footing in this strange new world,...