Magic Time

A middle-aged columnist revisits a personal tragedy from the civil rights era in this Southern tale of love, mystery, and justice by an award-winning author. "Marlette sets a harmonic tone, both glorious and deeply moving. Perfectly captures a time of epic change. An epic work of Southern fiction." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Born and raised in Mississippi, Carter Ransom came to New York as a young man and has risen to become a columnist with a major city newspaper. But when his life in New York falls apart and he heads back home to recover, the still-live conflicts of his youth in the civil rights era rise up all around him again. A twenty-five-year-old murder case has just been reopened, a church bombing that killed Carter's first love. Carter's father was the judge in the case, and now there's evidence that the trial was flawed, even fixed, and the case's reopening threatens the foundation of Carter's identity, as well as his relationship to his family. Moving between New York City and the New South of the early 1990s, with flashbacks to Mississippi's Freedom Summer of 1964, Magic Time is "a compelling legal thriller, touching tribute, and a zesty love story rolled into one" ( The Boston Globe). "Charming, engaging, and gripping . . . Magic Time presents a realistic portrait of the collective amnesia of the South and the generational tensions that the civil rights movement stirred up, then and now." — The Washington Post