"Narrators Shayna Small and Neil Shah transport listeners to 1940s New York in this dark fantasy set against a backdrop of racial tension and brewing war...Both narrators also excel at a range of accents, making this audiobook a fully immersive experience." -- AudioFile Magazine
The dangerous magic of The Night Circus meets the powerful historical exploration of The Underground Railroad in Alaya Dawn Johnson's timely and unsettling novel, set against the darkly glamorous backdrop of New York City, where an assassin falls in love and tries to change her fate at the dawn of World War II.
Amid the whir of city life, a young woman from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she’s hired to use her knives to strike fear among its most dangerous denizens.
Ten years later, Phyllis LeBlanc has given up everything—not just her own past, and Dev, the man she loved, but even her own dreams.
Still, the ghosts from her past are always by her side—and history has appeared on her doorstep to threaten the people she keeps in her heart. And so Phyllis will have to make a harrowing choice, before it’s too late—is there ever enough blood in the world to wash clean generations of injustice?
Trouble the Saints is a dazzling, daring novel—a magical love story, a compelling exposure of racial fault lines—and an altogether brilliant and deeply American saga.
A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books
“Juju assassins, alternate history, a gritty New York crime story...in a word: awesome.” —N.K. Jemisin, New York Times bestselling author of The Fifth Season
Release date:
July 21, 2020
Publisher:
Tom Doherty Associates
Print pages:
320
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
It had been Dev’s voice at the end of the dream; just his voice, warning me against nothing I could see; just his voice, pushing me awake, and away from him, again. He had only ever called me Phyllis in extremity: mortal danger, orgasm. I wondered which it would be this time.
“Christ,” said the dentist, jamming his cigarette into my silver ashtray and getting another. “Christ, where’s that lighter? I hate even thinking about Red Man, and you have to go and dream about him…”
“He’s not so bad. Not like Victor.”
The dentist flinched. “You know what they say, the things he’s done. You just like him because he likes you … you and that snake girl, what’s her name—”
“Tamara,” I said, not for the first time. The star of the famous snake dance at the Pelican Club was my best friend in the city. Lately, because my life has not tended to kindness, she’d also been Dev’s girl. But my own lover couldn’t bother himself to remember the name of some Negro showgirl.
I leaned over the dentist to take another cigarette too, but instead he caught up my hand and gently traced its scars. I hated when he did that, though I never stopped him. The dentist’s hands were chapped with alcohol and smelled like rubber, while I rubbed mine with shea butter every morning. But his had done nothing worse than pull teeth and fix caps for Victor and his men. He found my scars to remind me of the necessary distance between us, the dentist and the hatchet girl.
“Are you going to take the job, if it comes?”
Was it disgust that flattened his tone? Or indifference? My heart shuddered uselessly, but I kept steady and kissed behind his left ear, the way he liked. He groaned.
The dentist was my bargain; the dentist I could keep.
It was easier to move through the world with him on my elbow than alone, when the doormen were more suspicious of women of my complexion. Unlike most white men of my acquaintance, he rarely let a bad word escape his lips about Negroes or even any other group. Besides, he was handsome enough and in possession of an understanding wife. For those qualities, I overlooked his other lapses as a lover—an aversion to cunnilingus, the ghoulish whiteness of his teeth, the faint but clinging scent of antiseptic. My dissatisfactions were, I knew, the inevitable neuroses of his profession, and considering those of my own profession, I was inclined to anticipatory forgiveness, hoping to get the same gold for myself. If I lost him, I wouldn’t have an easy time finding an old man half so nice; not at thirty-five, with my first grays wiggling out of my lye-made hair, and the scars that only Dev might have loved.
“How long has it been since the last one, darling?”
“Months,” I said, not wanting to own the number—seven—which felt too long and too short. I took a breath before answering the other question. “They’re bad people, you know, that’s all Victor gives me. Murderers and rapists. Real scum. When I signed on with Victor, that was our deal. That I’d be more than a hatchet man. That I could make the world a better place.”
By killing people? You really believe that. I could hear Dev’s voice in the silence; the dentist only nodded.
“Russian Vic’s angel of justice. His holy knife.” Pronounced carefully, like he was reading it from a book.
My fingers locked. Most people called me that first thing—Victor’s angel, sometimes of justice. But only a few, the ones who had known me longest, called me his knife.
“Where did you hear that?” I asked.
The dentist looked out the window. “That—I mean, the Hindu bartender—Dev, right?—called you that once. Stuck in my head. Sounded more biblical when he said it, though.”
To Dev, there was no such thing as holy violence. I hadn’t quite believed him when he first said so, not even when I let him take me from the city. He told me about karma and the weight of our past and present lives, but I only felt it long after.
These days I avoided Victor, I refused jobs, I worried alone because I could not add to my ledger, and I could not bury my knives. But Red Man would visit soon. The dreams the hands give don’t lie. I had to choose, one more time.
I could go back to Harlem, to the shabby familiarity of the old apartment complex at the corner of 130th and Lenox. Move in with my sister Gloria and her husband Tom and their kids. Red Man would find me there but he’d leave me alone if I asked. I wouldn’t have Dev, and I wouldn’t have the knives, and I wouldn’t have everything I hated and loved about being Victor’s angel of justice—
Gloria loved me, but she wouldn’t open her home to a murderess, not even her sister.
“Aren’t you afraid?” the dentist asked.
For a jittery moment, I thought he had read my mind—or seen my ghosts. Lenox Avenue, the tony apartments on Sugar Hill around the corner, afternoon number runs for Madame Stephanie and the Barkley brothers, the barber shops and the stoops and the rent parties and buffet flats that lasted till morning, the sex and the poetry. Policy slips like numbered confetti in the silk purse bound tight by my garter.
But the dentist only knew Phyllis LeBlanc, not Phyllis Green.
“Afraid of the second dream,” he said when I just stared at him.
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