Nothing More DangerousNothing More Dangerous

After fifteen years of growing up in the Ozark hills with his widowed mother, Boady Sanden is beyond ready to move on. At high school, if he isn't being pushed around, he's being completely ignored. He dreams of glass towers and cityscapes, driven by his desire to be anywhere other than Jessup, Missouri. Then Thomas Elgin moves in across the road. Coming to know the Elgins—a black family settling into a community built on a foundation of "us" and "them"—forces Boady to rethink his understanding of the world he's taken for granted. Secrets hidden in plain sight begin to unfold: the mother who wraps herself in the loss of her husband, the neighbor who bears the wounds of a mysterious past, the quiet boss who is fighting his own unseen battle. But the biggest secret of all is the disappearance of Lida Poe, the black woman who keeps the books at the local plastics factory. Word has it that Ms. Poe left town, along with a hundred thousand dollars of company money. Although Boady has never met the missing woman, he discovers that the threads of her life are woven deeply into the fabric of his world. AS the mystery of Lida Poe's fate plays out, Boady begins to see the stark lines of race and class which both bind and divide his small town. And then he's forced to choose sides.