“Blair Underwood Presents Sins of Survivors” by Joe McClean
c.2025,
Amistad
$19.99
288 pages
Mom never had to worry.
She didn’t have to tell you again after she reminded you to look out for your siblings. From then on, you had one another’s backs; you were a team nobody messed with. And all these years later, you still watch out for them today because family comes first in your house, and in “Blair Underwood Presents Sins of Survivors,” by Joe McClean.
Now and then, Benjamin Carter woke up, remembering.
He was a youngster when white men killed his father in a way that still caused nightmares. It’d been decades since then, when his oldest brother, Jasper, took charge and moved Benjamin, their sister, and their half-brother away from Alabama to the safety of Ohio, then to Detroit. Decades, but the memories never went away.
Still, Benjamin and Jasper had done well for themselves. In 1937, the Detroit suburb of Black Bottom was mostly thriving despite hard times, and the Carter brothers were important men in business, industry, and entertainment.
As long as they paid the bribes required to the police force and to the other powerful organized crime groups that ruled the Black Bottom section of Detroit, there’d be no trouble. Everything was good as long as Benjamin’s sons and Jasper’s children could keep the family businesses running smoothly.
Still, there was trouble. Tensions were heating up between the automakers and the unions, and Benjamin’s connections with corrupt politicians were complicated by racism and grift from outside forces. His son, the one who ran the Carter brothers’ most profitable business, a nightclub, was involved with a Russian prostitute at a brothel run by a woman who Benjamin didn’t want to admit was his cousin. His youngest son was a dreamer. His daughter was fast becoming invested in women’s rights. And it was possible that his half-brother, Lance, a man Benjamin hated, might not be on the Carter brothers’ side…
Starting about thirty pages in, “Sins of Survivors” is rough. There are too many characters in it – some come and go on a page and never return – and there are large chunks of book in which you may not entirely know what’s happening. It’s a struggle.
That doesn’t mean it’s a total waste of time, however.
As the screenwriter-director that he is, author Joe McClean offers an action-packed story that’s based in part on real history. The story has touches of crime and corruption that will appeal to readers of 1930s-type noir fiction or fans of the Francis Ford Coppola trilogy. The side stories in which the Carter brothers’ children partake are a nice touch, too, because plot threads like those don’t often appear in gangster novels.
But do those good things overshadow the roughness? Your need for clarity will determine that because it’s not always here in this novel. Blair Underwood Presents Sins of Survivors isn’t all bad, but it’s not a Tennyson Hardwick novel, if that’s what you want. Keep that in mind before you look for it.
