Trouble the Saints

New York on the edge of the Second World War, and Phyllis LeBlanc has spent a decade passing as white and killing for Victor, the mob boss who runs the numbers and the knife work in Harlem's shadow. Her hands are saint's hands, one of the gifts that come to some Black Americans and never to anyone else: hers throw a blade that will not miss. Dev's hands warn him of danger, which has made him useful to Victor as a doorman who can spot a weapon, and which he despises. Tamara reads the cards and dances at the Pelican, and has spent years telling herself she can stay clear. Phyllis has been assured all along that the people she is sent to kill deserve it. When she learns what she has actually been used for, the accounting begins, and Johnson turns the novel over to each of the three in turn, so the same events are re-lit by whoever has to live inside them. It is a hard-boiled crime novel with the moral machinery running the other way, asking what happens to a gift meant for justice when it is rented out, and what penance is even available.