BLANCHE ON THE LAM by Barbara Neely is the first book in the Blanche White mystery series. It is the first look at the domestic worker turned sleuth.
Blanche White, a forty-year-old black domestic worker with big thighs, a wry sense of humor, and a jaundiced view of the rich, finds it hard enough making ends meet on the pittance she earns doing day work for the genteel Southern families of North Carolina. But when her fourth bad check lands her a jail sentence, Blanche goes on the lam.
Inadvertently, she finds work at the summer home of a wealthy family, the members of which have plenty of their own secrets. When someone is killed, Blanche would just as soon mind her own business, given that she's already got her own troubles with the law. But since she is the most likely suspect unless she uncovers the real killer, Blanche puts her considerable wit and intelligence to work. With the help of the remarkably efficient old-girl network among domestic workers, Blanche attacks the tangled web surrounding the murder to try and nail the true killer in time. In the process, Blanche provides a running commentary from a black, working-class, feminist perspective that is new to the mystery genre and rare in any fiction.
Barbara Neely is a novelist, short story writer, and author of the popular Blanche White mystery novels. Blanche On The Lam, won the Agatha, the Macavity, and the Anthony -- three of the four major mystery awards for best first novel -- as well as the Go On Girl! Book Club award for a debut novel. The subsequent books in the series, Blanche Among The Talented Tenth, Blanche Cleans Up and Blanche Passes Go have also received critical acclaim from both fans and literary critics. Books in the Blanche White series have been taught in courses at universities as varied as Howard University, Northwestern, Bryn Mawr, Old Dominion, Boston College, Appalachian State University, Washington State University and Guttenberg University in Mainz, Germany. The books in the series have been translated into French, German and Japanese. In addition to writing, Barbara Neely is also host of Commonwealth Journal, a radio interview program in Massachusetts.
March
2002
