Attorney Justin Glass is the scion of the first family of St. Louis politics, but depression and the death of his wife have reduced him to working for pennies in a ramshackle law office on the decaying North Side. Pennies are all that eight-year-old Tanisha Walker has to offer when she walks into Glass’s empty office one day, asking him to take up the case of her missing brother. Glass’s half-hearted inquiries turn up empty—until his contact at the St. Louis Police Department calls with the grisly news. Devon Walker’s murdered body has been found mangled in the woods—along with 12 other black teenagers, all discarded like trash in a mass grave.
The timely thriller LITTLE BOY LOST (Thomas & Mercer; On-sale August 1st, 2017) tells the all-too-familiar story of a community in pain and a legal system that doesn’t work for them. When the police show indifference, the families of what the media is calling the “Lost Boys” have no one to turn to but their overwhelmed lawyer. But Glass has his hands full with his own family life, which is blowing up before him. His father, St. Louis’s long-serving congressman, returns home to announce that he is retiring—and wants Justin to succeed him, betraying the arrangement that had been long planned by his politically ambitious brother, Lincoln. Glass must sort out his feelings in his turbulent yet dispassionate extramarital affair with an old friend—who also happens to be the sitting mayor of St. Louis. And as he trains his attention elsewhere, Glass’s headstrong daughter, Sam, begins rebelling at school, in ways that threaten to become a political liability.
After years of standing still, Glass must now act in order to survive. As rumors about his political campaign spill out into the open, he finds that he has become a vessel for the pent-up grievances of St. Louis’s inner city. Clients pack into his previously empty office with stories of being wrongfully accused of crimes—their uncomfortable truths as ignored by the white establishment as the fate of the Lost Boys. As Glass maneuvers a justice system stacked against the black community, he grows increasingly distrustful of his allies of convenience in the city government. Is their plodding investigation into the Lost Boys murders the result of racial prejudice...or a cover-up of an inside job? As police violence descends upon his community—and even Glass himself—he takes the investigation into his own hands. With the help of an alluring, whip-cracking assistant and a shady computer programmer, Glass stares down the twin dangers of a vengeful political machine and a merciless killer who knows Glass is on his tail. Feeling the heat from all sides, Glass resorts to one last desperate gambit that could destroy his personal life, shatter his professional ambitions, and endanger the very people he is trying to save.
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In a city divided and broken, this revelation will set it on fire…
Attorney Justin Glass’s practice, housed in a shabby office on the north side of Saint Louis, isn’t doing so well that he can afford to work for free. But when eight-year-old Tanisha Walker offers him a jar full of change to find her missing brother, he doesn’t have the heart to turn her away.
Justin had hoped to find the boy alive and well. But all that was found of Devon Walker was his brutally murdered body—and the bodies of twelve other African American teenagers, all discarded like trash in a mass grave. Each had been reported missing. And none had been investigated.
As simmering racial tensions explode into violence, Justin finds himself caught in the tide. And as he gives voice to the discontent plaguing the city’s forgotten and ignored, he vows to search for the killer who preys upon them.
J.D. Trafford is an award-winning author whose books have topped numerous Amazon bestseller lists, including reaching #1 on the Legal Thrillers list. He has been named “a writer of merit” by Mystery Scene magazine, and IndieReader selected his debut novel, No Time to Run, as a bestselling pick. Trafford graduated with honors from a top-20 law school, and he has worked as a civil and criminal prosecutor and as a nonprofit attorney, where he handled issues of housing, education, and poverty.
J.D. Trafford is the author of the 'No Time' legal thrillers
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