BETWEEN SKIN AND BONE - A ZEE BLACKWELL STORY

AVAILABLE JULY, 2025.

Zee Blackwell knows how to find lost things—money, people, truth. Everything except himself.

Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1962, Between Skin and Bone introduces Zee Blackwell—a light-skinned Black man, former Merchant Marine, and quiet drifter who lives by three rules: don’t bluff, don’t beg, don’t forget. When he returns home after years away, Zee finds the Delta changed, but not healed. Old debts linger. New dangers fester. And Irene, the woman he once loved—and maybe still does—now wears someone else’s ring and carries her own buried secrets.

When a crooked preacher’s son goes missing and the Dixie Mafia starts sniffing through the juke joints and cotton fields, Zee is pulled into a web of violence, betrayal, and reckoning. To survive, he'll have to walk the line between what is legal, what is right, and what the Delta demands.

Between Skin and Bone is Southern noir soaked in memory and menace—a story about what a man carries, what he loses, and what still waits for him in the blood-red dirt of home.

ISBN: 979-8-9897952-4-6, 128 pages (novella)