Last year, Mickelbury introduced Carole Ann "C.A." Gibson, a Washington, DC criminal defense attorney in One Must Wait. Carole Ann was married to Alain Crandall, a successful corporate attorney. Just as the couple begin to question their professional values, Al is murdered.

As C.A. seeks to discover who killed her husband and why, she uncovers cracks in the criminal justice system, class and color discrimination, political corruption and environmental racism.

Where to Choose, the sequel to One Must Wait, begins a year later. C.A. is still grieving over Al's death. She has made surface changes, but she hasn't tried a case in over a year. Neither family nor friends have been able to help her get back on track.

A call for help from her mother in Los Angeles is enough to get her to leave Washington. C.A. packs up her clothes and her memories and heads for Jacaranda Estates, the racially mixed neighborhood in which she grew up.

Jacaranda Estates was established in the 1950s as a utopian community. It was a social experiment begun by Ernesto Jamilla, a Mexican-American bricklayer and paper hanger, and Arthur Jennings, an African-American carpenter and painter. The two became friends and later partners in J and J Contracting. Jacaranda Estates was their dream.

Jamilla and Jennings would sell the units only to Blacks and Mexicans, at a reasonable and affordable rate. But with a caveat: Blacks and Mexicans would be required to live next door to each other and to learn about each other. And only those persons, agreeing in writing, to those terms were allowed to buy into Jacaranda Estates."

Brown and Black residents lived peacefully together for more than four decades. Recently, property crimes and murders began to destroy the tranquility of the Los Angeles enclave. The police refuse to investigate. And, as C.A. tries to find out what is happening and why, the trail leads to Mexico and the Caribbean.

In Carole Ann Gibson, Penny Mickelbury created another feisty, yet feminine African-American detective. She investigates murders and other criminal activity in Jacaranda Estates while she fights the bureaucratic racism and sexism that impedes her investigation.

The pace and characterization is much improved over the first Carole Ann Gibson mystery. And, although Where to Choose works as a stand-alone mystery, there are so many questions that can be answered by reading One Must Wait, I recommend that book be read first. Tommy and Valerie Griffin and former police detective Jake Graham, characters from One Must Wait, play key roles in this novel.

--Gwendolyn Osborne