Ghost Skins

by Vern E. Smith

Chicago…
In the capable hands of Edgar Award nominee Vern E. Smith, author of The Jones Men, America’s domestic terrorism threat unfolds in a pulse-pounding narrative as Chicago PD Special Homicide Unit Detective Emerson Dawes probes the shooting of a beloved NFL star by a white police officer. The search for the truth as tensions in the city grow morphs into an international conspiracy that threatens not only Dawes’s life but the lives of his wife and son.

With time running out, Dawes must forge an uneasy alliance with an FBI agent in a race to prevent more acts of terror. Meanwhile, a mysterious foreign spy stalks Chicago, watching the fuse tick down on a human time bomb. GHOST SKINS leaps forward like an uncoiled snake, gripping the reader through the twists and turns of a master storyteller. Winner of a 2024 Outstanding Book Award of the Author's Showcase of the National Association of Black Journalists(NABJ.)

359 pages, Paperback

Published September 23, 2024

About the author

Vernon Emile Smith (Natchez, Mississippi, 1946) studied at San Francisco university. In 1971, he begun to work with several newspapers in California, later he worked for Newsweek in Detroit. His article «Detroit's Heroin Subculture» won the Detroit Press Club Foundation prize and became the inspiration of his only novel, The Jones Men, published in 1974 and traslated in spanish, italian and french.
For more than twenty years he continued to work for Newsweek in Atlanta, were he mostly wrote articles about Vietnam's veterans and other social issues as the movements for Civil Rights and the O. J. Simpson case. Vern Smith always tried to work for a cinema-verité film adaptation of The Jones Men and recently he start working on a second novel, titled Dry Heat.