WHILE WE WERE BURNING

In a wealthy Memphis suburb, a Black boy’s death is avenged.

Koffi’s debut features a first-person narrator, Elizabeth Smith, who is perceived as crazy by her husband and employer because she thinks the death of her neighbor, Patricia Fitzgerald—found hanging from a lamp post after a Halloween party—was murder rather than suicide. When anxiety medication doesn’t solve the problem, her husband and therapist decide she should hire a personal assistant to help her stay on course. Through a listserv, Elizabeth meets Brianna Thompson, a beautiful Black woman who seems perfect for the job. But we learn early on that Brianna has found her way into Elizabeth’s privileged white life for a reason—a reason that involves the murder of her son, Jay, by the police in Elizabeth and Patricia’s neighborhood, the upscale Harbor Town section of Memphis. While underdeveloped characters and settings make it difficult to fully invest in the story, it’s clear that Elizabeth’s foundering marriage and Brianna’s righteous grief and rage are on a collision course. The element that drives the book is its fury about racism, which is threaded into comparisons of Nashville and Memphis, the history of the learning center where Elizabeth works, a Harbor Town message board, and of course the main plot, a ripped-from-the-headlines 911 call that led to Jay’s shooting. This aspect of the book is potent, but lack of character development remains a problem. A surprise visit from Elizabeth’s mother, Dawn, is probably meant to fill in some backstory for Elizabeth, but the strokes are so broad that it almost comes off as parody. “I always knew how you would turn out,” her mother says. “I always knew that you’d fall in love and have a beautiful life. And I always knew that they’d find you dead with a bottle of pills in your hand.” A few paragraphs later, Dawn asks, “Now, what does it say about you if people keep killing themselves just to get away from you?” “You’re fucking evil," Elizabeth replies. "That’s what you fucking are.”

A politically aware thriller from a passionate rookie author.