Martin Kerner blew it. A whiskey stained semester torpedoed his shot at the law degree he’d worked his whole life towards. With one final opportunity for redemption, what stands in his way is not a person or a thing. It’s a place.
DETROIT.
A place, as a white suburbanite, he’d been indoctrinated to fear. A place where once upon a time, in a dark and snowy alley, he’d made a dangerous enemy. A place where a mysterious professor is seemingly hellbent on his failure.

And to go there means a showdown with Jack Kerner, his bigoted, alcoholic father who hides secrets borne from the city’s race riot forty years in the past.

But in Danielle, a black girl of indomitable spirit and beauty, Martin finds it’s also a place with an irrepressible soul. As she needles her way into his heart, the two Kerners are forced to reevaluate their thoughts on race, family and love. All the while, looming threats from their past indiscretions lurk in the city's shadows.

Nocturne In Black And White is the gritty and unflinching debut novel by Erik Belcarz. At times both unsettling and uplifting, this decades-spanning tale of love, loss, ruin and hope is sure to linger in the mind long after the last page is turned.

Erik Belcarz

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