Fiction: Murder on Strivers' Row

This was the first book for which I received a contract. That was back in 2001. Simon & Schuster put out the hardcover in 2002 and Penguin Putnam released the trade paperback in 2003. Here's what the back of the book writers came up with:

Four years after dropping out of Harlem society, David McKay, a handsome young lawyer from a prominent Strivers' Row family, returns home, devastated by the news of his sister Lilian's suicide. What caused his once stable, gentle sister to take her own life? Why did she marry Jameson Sweet, giving a man she barely knew a claim to the family home? What caused her flamboyant twin, Gem, to return to Harlem from Paris, forge new bonds, and suddenly depart again? Most important, why did Lilian feel compelled to keep David in the dark about it all?

Burdened by a secret of his own, David dares to stay in Harlem just long enough to stave off the threat to his family home and answer questions about Lilian's death. Entering her world, he rediscovers what he left behind -- a place of suffocating class strictures, seductive patrons, and aristocratic civil rights leaders. His inquiry takes him from the wealthy salons of Renaissance Harlem to the crowded tenements of its poor. He uncovers old loves and festering hatreds. But the deeper he probes, the closer he comes to unleashing forces that threaten to reveal his own crippling secret -- a secret that could destroy him or redeem him.

“A murder mystery set among the black bourgeoisie, it is also the heady tale of a bygone era…What distinguishes this novel is Walker’s attention to the workings and characters of the times, from the club stars to the numbers runners.”—The Boston Globe