About this Event
Join us at West Side Books on December 2nd at 7:15pm for an author reading and signing with Patricia Raybon. She will be in conversation with journalist Sandra Fish.
A courageous young woman struggles to rise above her dirt-poor beginnings and outsmart a Nazi threat on U.S. soil during WWII in this thrilling Southern tale of bravery, love, and forgiveness.
Sedalia, North Carolina, 1943. While war rages overseas, Laurette Lowe faces a more personal battle when she lands a job teaching math at La Porte Academy, a prestigious Black finishing school. Determined to rise above her sharecropping roots, deep family hurt, and the suffocating limits of Jim Crow, Laurette quickly learns that survival and success demand constant vigilance, carefully measuring every step and word to earn her place among the social elite.
A chance encounter with Nev Pierce, a handsome Army lieutenant from nearby Camp Butner, threatens to derail her plans. Though she first dismisses him as an unwelcome distraction, she's drawn in by his request to decipher a cryptic message passed to him by an Italian POW. What begins as an intellectual puzzle becomes a chilling revelation: details of a Nazi plot to assassinate the U.S. president.
Cracking the cipher, however, only brings a more troubling puzzle. Army officials at the segregated base are unlikely to heed a Black schoolteacher's warning and Nev could land in serious trouble for involving an unauthorized civilian. With time running out, Laurette and Nev enlist a small circle of allies from the school in a cunning and courageous ploy, boldly risking their futures and lives to stop a deadly threat no one else sees coming.
Patricia Raybon is a Colorado author and essayist who writes daring and exciting novels at the intersection of faith and race. Her devotional writing appears in Our Daily Bread, where she's a regular contributor. She has won both the Christy Award and the Christianity Today Book Award for her fiction. Her new novel, The Sedalia Code, was inspired by her parents' wartime romance and the plot of a Nazi attack on US soil. Patricia's father was a young lieutenant stationed at Camp Butner in North Carolina when he met Patricia's mother, who was born and raised near the renowned Palmer Memorial Institute, a prep school for daughters of wealthy Black Durham residents.
Sandra Fish has covered government and politics in Iowa, Florida, New Mexico and Colorado. She was a full-time journalism instructor at the University of Colorado for eight years, and her work as appeared on CPR, KUNC, The Washington Post, Roll Call and other outlets. She likes to knit, weave, read, bicycle and watch sports.
Event venue & nearby stays
West Side Books & Curios, 3434 West 32nd Avenue, Denver, United States
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