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Cover Design by Eric Gulliver
1975. America has lost its war in Vietnam and Cambodia. Racially-tinged riots are tearing the city of Boston apart. The politics and counterculture of the 1960s is disintegrating into nothing more than sex, drugs and rock and roll. The Boston Red Sox are on one of their improbable runs toward a postseason appearance. In a suburban town in Maryland, a young couple is murdered and another young man is accused. The couple are white and the accused is black. It is up to his friends and family to prove he is innocent. This is a story of suburban ennui, race, murder and injustice. Religion and politics, liberal lawyers and racist cops. In Short Order Frame Up, Ron Jacobs has written a piece of crime fiction that exposes the wound that is US racism. Two cultures existing side by side and across generations--a river very few dare to cross. His characters work and live with and next to each other, often unaware of the other's real life. When the murder occurs, however, those people that care about the man charged must cross that river and meet somewhere in between in order to free him from (what is to them) an obvious miscarriage of justice.
About the Author
Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (Verso 1997) the novels, Short Order Frame Up, The Co-Conspirator’s Tale, and a collection of essays titled Tripping Through the American Night. He is a frequent contributor to Counterpunch and Dissident Voice. His articles, reviews and essays have appeared in anthologies and numerous print and online journals, including Jungle World Berlin, Monthly Review, The Sri Lanka Guardian, Vermont Times, Alternative Press Review and the Olympia, WA based monthly Works In Progress. He currently lives in Burlington, Vermont, and works at a library.
Amazon author page
Blog: ron is still home
Ron Jacobs presents: Revolution in the Air? The 1960s Become the 1970s and the S**t Hits the Fan
Talking About History and More with Rob Robertson on his Out of the Blank Podcast
Praise
”With Short Order, Ron Jacobs delivers something I haven't come across since the works of James Baldwin: a great anti-racist novel. Powerful and political without being preachy. Poignant without being treacly. It's stunning."
—Dave Zirin, author of Game Over, sportswriter for The Nation
“Finally a novel about social and racial justice wrapped in the digestible genre of a murder mystery and set in Baltimore, a town that divides the north from the south and embodies the hopes and prejudices of post-60s America. Ron Jacobs, author of The Way the Wind Blew, a History of the Weather Underground, is an excellent journalist and Short-Order Frame Up is charged by its keen eye for historical detail and social conscience. But the devotion to context never interferes with the relentless pull of the story. A finely written but disturbing novel that probes the lingering bruises on the American psyche."
—Jeffrey St. Clair, Editor, Counterpunch
