Harlem Hit & Run

Harlem Hit & Run is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Second Edition

Cover Illustration © Daniel Marin Medina

Cover and Interior by JW Manus

For editing and speaking the truth about the last version of Harlem Hit & Run, Nzingha Clarke and Joanne Dwyer. For supporting my storytelling, many, including the Harlem Writers Guild and Harlem Neighborhood Writers. And for keeping me alive and in the present, a moment and a breath at a time, a wealth of friends, many of whom are anonymous.

I was pitching a Harlem murder mystery to a literary agent, and when I said my hero was a Buddhist, she said, “A Buddhist in the city? That’s a book I would buy.”

Still, in the City. Finding Peace of Mind in the Midst of Urban Chaos was published on September 11, 2018 by Skyhorse Publishing.

Harlem Hit & Run is that murder mystery. It is set during one week in November 1990 between two editions of a weekly newpaper as a community bank fails.

I started on a contemplative path in New Mexico’s Southern Rockies on retreat from journalism, politics and government, and I have stopped my busyness to teach and write and practice.

I chose to stay in Harlem after traveling as an Army brat through the segregated south and fleeing to Howard University and a summer at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Harlem is a complex character in my story, as it is for my hero, bad-ass actress Pearl Washington.

She plays Lt. Summer Knight in her action movies, and she is studying the Buddha’s teaching as part of her martial arts training.

I’ve enjoyed finding myself writing in a Buddhist moment when, for instance, Pearl has to decide whether or not to arm herself.

She chants over Cecelia Miller when her friend is hit and killed by a car on 125th Street: “Remember all this fleeting world is a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightening in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.”

Her lover, a Harlem cop, hears her and asks her to lead his 28th Precinct police people in a meditation.