In Blanche Passes Go, the fourth installment of Neely’s popular mystery series, Blanche is returning to her hometown of Farleigh, North Carolina to help her best friend, Ardell, with her fledgling catering business.

Blanche has been living in Roxbury, Massachusetts with her late sister’s two children whom she has adopted. Three years earlier, she was sentenced to 30 days in jail for writing more than $40 in bad checks after her employers left town without paying her. Her fortuitous liberation a short time later and subsequent events are played out in Neely’s debut novel, Blanche on the Lam. At the end of the third tale in the series, Blanche Cleans Up, we learn that the local courthouse - along with any incriminating records - has been destroyed in a fire. The children have activities that will keep them busy throughout the season so Blanche decides she can finally go home, if only for the summer.

The return to Farleigh is bittersweet. While the courthouse records may have been destroyed, Blanche is still on the lam in many ways. She is still on the run from people, places, and events from her not-so-pleasant past. She has arrived in the “New South” where “they still occasionally named their sons Braxton and Zebulon, in honor of their Confederate, slaver ancestors, and they still didn’t invite their string of mulatto relatives with the same looks and last name to sit down at the family table.” Old demons are waiting within the Farleigh city limits to confront her face-to-face. There’s Blanche’s prickly mother, Miz Cora. Leo, her childhood sweetheart and his wife. And David Palmer, member of a prominent white Farleigh family, who raped Blanche eight years earlier.

“Suddenly she felt as though she’d been frozen for the last eight years, as though her life were a game of Monopoly in which she was struck at Go. Certainly she had gone on with her life and she’d done all right with what she had to work with. But she could see now that a part of her was still back there, curled up like a broken child on that bathroom floor.”

Blanche never filed a police report and only Ardell knows about incident. She had hoped to return to Farleigh without encountering David Palmer. However, when a Maybelle Jenkins is murdered, Blanche discovers a link between the young white woman and David Palmer. She is determined to make him pay for the crime. Blanche is further drawn into Palmers’ circle when she learns David’s sister is engaged to marry a former employer Mumsfield Carter, III.

Solving the mystery of Maybelle Jenkins’ death in this novel is, in many ways, secondary to uncovering the mystery of Blanche White’s life. We get to see Blanche in her own milieu as a daughter, sister, lover, friend and African-American woman. There is a new love interest in the form of Amtrak conductor Thelvin Lewis.

BarbaraNeely’s activist background serves her well. Other stories have dealt with issues of race, class and gender bias; environmental racism; and intra-racial discrimination. The focus in Blanche Passes Go is on violence against women in its various forms and what should be done about it. The story also touches on revenge and forgiveness. There is no soapbox, just common sense and wisdom of the ancestors. It’s worth a look.

--Gwendolyn Osborne