The little-known story of an iconic photographer, whose work captured—and influenced—a critical moment in American history. Ernest Withers took some of the most legendary images of the 1950s and ’60s: Martin Luther King, Jr., riding a newly integrated bus in Montgomery, Alabama; Emmett Till’s uncle pointing an accusatory finger across the courtroom at his nephew’s killer; scores of African-American protestors carrying a forest of signs reading “i am a man.” But at the same time, Withers was working as an FBI informant. In this gripping narrative history, Preston Lauterbach examines the complicated political and economic forces that informed Withers’s seeming betrayal of the people he photographed, and “does a masterful job of telling the story of civil rights in Memphis in the 1960s” (Ed Ward, Financial Times), including the events surrounding Dr. King’s tumultuous final march in Memphis.

All the stories in Malice In Memphis: Bluff City Mysteries are pure fiction, even if the locations in which they take place aren't. Our mystery writers group, Malice in Memphis, is always looking for interesting local landmarks to use as settings for great mysteries. The characters who inhabit these places in our stories are also fictional, as are the things they do, both good and bad. Mystery writers walk into a room for the first time and consider where we could most efficiently kill somebody in an interesting way. We discuss untraceable poisons in restaurants-and terrify the poor people who wait on us. We wonder whether the beam that runs across the ceiling in church would hold up a hanging corpse, and how long a dagger would have to be to puncture a heart. We are essentially peaceful. We can always bump off unpleasant people in our writing. No reason to do it in actuality. So don't blame the blameless landmarks we've used. Remember, it's all fiction...