Hi there. This is Angel Johnson from the Dallas police department. I’m a homicide detective and most often partnered with Sarah Kingsly. We’ve worked several cases together, and we’re still trying to make this partnership work. Sometimes it’s as challenging as a love relationship. A few years ago, the powers that be in the PR Department thought it would be a good move to partner a Black woman with Sarah after she had to shoot a Black kid and the community was in an uproar.

Neither one of us wanted the partnership back then, and it’s been prickly ever since. Ever touched a cactus?

I’m supposed to tell you about a day in my life, so I’ve decided to share about the day I badgered Maryann to write this fourth book in our series. Despite what you see on TV, a normal day for a detective can be pretty boring. Just lots of research on potential suspects in a case, reading reports from forensics, with maybe an interview thrown into the mix to break that monotony.

But the day I talked Maryann into writing this book was anything but ordinary.

Here’s what happened. When she first decided to write about police brutality and cops killing so many Black men and women, she was going to give the story to this new character she’d come up with. A private investigator called Memphis, and I was like, “Hold on there. Wait a minute. This is my story. These are my people. These Black folks getting killed. And the families grieving. And the people protesting. They’re all my people, and I understand what they’re going through better than this Memphis person ever could.”

As a Black woman police officer, I’d been holding back on speaking my mind for most of my career. Didn’t want to make waves. Didn’t want to call out any of my coworkers for the racist attitudes they had. Sarah can tell you how hard it is to be a woman in police work, and I’m here to tell you it’s twice as hard for a Black woman. Let alone one that wants to tell her superiors that there’s some really, really bad cops patrolling the streets of Dallas.

Brutal Season, A Seasons Mystery Series Book #4
Genre: Police Procedural
Release: April 2023
Format: Digital
Purchase Link

Eighteen-year-old Jamel Frederickson is shot and killed by a White, rookie Dallas police officer. His crime? Being Black and mentally ill.

Following that unwarranted death, anger and violence erupt on the streets, leading to the murders of two protestors who were marching around the downtown federal building.

Detectives Sarah Kingsly and Angel Johnson are thrust into the investigation of two subsequent murders, while desperately clinging to the threads of their partnership.

The shootings raise questions about whether the alt-right white supremacists that invaded the city with their guns and inflammatory rhetoric are responsible.

Will more people get killed?

Is there more than one person out there with an agenda?

When a member of the team, Ryan O’Donnell, is shot while attempting to prevent looting, the tension in the city, as well as within the department, ratchets up even higher. And it deeply affects Angel who’s been pretending she really isn’t falling for this White man.

Angel joins the protests to take a stand against racism in the city and within the department; an action that puts her job, her relationship with Ryan, and her fragile partnership with Sarah at risk.

For her part, Sarah comes to realize that she is not as enlightened as she thought she was, and both women just hope they can come through the personal and professional challenges and end up with something that resembles a true partnership.

While dodging bullets and catching the killers in the process.

About the author
Maryann Miller is an award-winning author of numerous novels, screenplays, short stories, and nonfiction books. Her standalone mystery, Doubletake, written with Margaret Sutton, was chosen as the best mystery of 2015 by the Texas Association of Authors. Desperate Season, the third book in the Seasons Mystery Series was given top honors in the Page Turner Awards. Stalking Season, book two of the series, won the John Weaver Excellent Read Award and received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. Miller is a member of Sisters in Crime, the Sherman Art League, and the Winnsboro Center for the Arts. She lives, works, and plays in a small city in North Texas.

All comments are welcomed.