The Reckoning - Book Three

Sit down. Find a chair, all of you, and let the door close. This is the last time I will begin this story.

Book Three of the Pearson Trilogy, and the end of it.

The door opens. Twenty-odd years after Thomas Hocutt was turned away, five students walk into a state university that had refused people like them since it was founded. Pearson is in the room where it happens, and he has spent his whole working life getting there.

And then the toll comes due on the far side of it. This book is about what the victory cost, and who paid.

Thirty-seven chapters. The grave at the start. Epps. The false bottom. The wire to the national men. The argument. The old door. The five walk in. The national office arrives with its money and its famous names, and a man who did the work for twenty years learns what the record will and will not hold.

A country which has wanted us out for three hundred years does not simply stop wanting it. It gets subtler. It finds an instrument that keeps its hands clean. Watch for the clean hands. That's all I have to teach you. The rest is only the story that taught it to me.

For the ones who opened the door and paid the toll on the far side of it.

Historical fiction anchored to the documented record. Concludes The Pearson Trilogy, after The Hocutt Catalyst and The Trench and the Conscience. The story begins in The Wrong Direction, a prequel, free in this store.

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