Kris Nelscott is an open pen name used by New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The first Smokey Dalton novel, A Dangerous Road, won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery and was short-listed for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; the second, Smoke-Filled Rooms, was a PNBA Book Award finalist; and the third, Thin Walls, was one of the Chicago Tribune's best mysteries of the year. Kirkus chose Days of Rage as one of the top ten mysteries of the year and it was also nominated for a Shamus award for The Best Private Eye Hardcover Novel of the Year.

Entertainment Weekly says her equals are Walter Mosley and Raymond Chandler. Booklist calls the Smokey Dalton books "a high-class crime series" and Salon says "Kris Nelscott can lay claim to the strongest series of detective novels now being written by an American author."

For more information about Kris Nelscott, or author Kristine Kathryn Rusch's other works, please go to KrisNelscott.com or KristineKathrynRusch.com.

Protectors by Kris Nelscott

A former combat nurse, a former legal secretary, and the owner of one of the first women-only gyms form an unlikely alliance in this fast-paced and riveting new work by the acclaimed historical mystery novelist Kris Nelscott.

The novel opens on the day of the Moon landing, July 20, 1969, two years after the Summer of Love changed Berkeley forever, and left lots of broken teenagers in its wake.

One of the first (if not the first) women-only gyms in the nation and the start of the Women's Self-Defense Movement bring June "Eagle" Eagleton, Valentina "Val" Wilson, and Pamela "Pammy" Griffin together.

They never intended to face the kidnappings and murders of college students. But no one else paid attention.

An amazing trip into the experiences and lives of 1969 Berkeley told with riveting attention to detail. A read that will keep you turning pages into the late night and shock you at the same time.

CURATOR'S NOTE

Kris Nelscott is my historical mystery pen name. Nelscott has received starred reviews, is an international bestseller, and has one series in development for film. Protectors is a book I've long wanted to write, featuring three strong women and the first self-defense class for women in 1969. – Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

REVIEWS

  • "Nelscott expertly mixes history and mystery, and readers will be happy that she intends to write more books about these distinctive people and eventful times."

    – Publisher’s Weekly

  • "Nelscott is a first-rate storyteller."

    – Kirkus Reviews

  • "Nelscott's series setting, in the turbulent late '60s, gives her books layers of issues of racism, class, and war, all of which still seem to remain sadly timely today."

    – Oregonian
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Val

If you talk to people, they'll tell you their life has a dividing line. Maybe the first date with their spouse. Maybe failing to get into the top college on their list. Maybe winning the big game in high school.

Something they can point to. Something important to them. Without it, they say, their life would be completely different. They'd have no kids or they'd live somewhere else or they'd be rich.

Me, I don't have a dividing line. I have a fucking crater. My life was shredded, ripped in half, completely destroyed. Shattered into so many tiny pieces that reassembling them is completely impossible.

I am not the same woman I was in November of 1968. Back then, I'd've had a dividing line. Depending on the day you asked me, I might've said that line was the divorce from my high school sweetheart. Or the decision to drop out of law school. Or, most likely, the fact that none of the med schools on my list would take me—not because of my grades. No, I graduated number one in my college class.

The med schools wouldn't take me because I'm not only female, I'm black too.

Two strikes, one admissions idiot told me. With your record, we'd take a risk on giving you a slot with one of those strikes. But two? No one'll take you for an internship. You won't get a residency. We'll be wasting that slot on you, honey. So sorry. Maybe the nursing school will look at you.

If you'd asked me in November of 1968, I would have said that conversation with that administrator was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It convinced me to marry Truman, consider having some babies. Made me apply to law school. Made me the best damn legal secretary in Chicago.

Made me give up.

I was so precious. So delicate. As if these things that happened then were adversity. As if these things were the worst that could ever happen to anyone, let alone someone like me.

Then, in early December, I humored my two sort-of cousins and best friends, Marvella and Paulette, by accompanying them to the Grand Nefertiti Ball at Sauer's Brauhaus. Marvella and Paulette, they looked gorgeous dressed in long gowns, wearing gold Egyptian bands on their upper arms. Marvella and Paulette, they're tall and stately women; I'm small, and that same outfit drowned me.

I felt ugly and silly and out of place.

Maybe that's why I danced with him. Maybe I danced with him because he was persistent. Maybe I'd had just a little too much to drink.

And no, I'm not going to tell you his name. I try not think his name. That makes him real, a person.

He wasn't a person.

And he wasn't a dividing line. That gives him too much power.

Maybe the dividing line came the next day, when I gently told him he didn't interest me. Or maybe it came at the end of January, when that son of a bitch forced his way into the hallway of my apartment building and raped me.

The rest of it—the friend from med school who said he could help me get rid of the pregnancy, the horrid, horrid fever, that ride to the hospital in the back of a car—plays in my mind in freeze-frame Chiaroscuro images:

The sharp pain in my abdomen, and my med school friend saying, It's nothing, Val. It should feel that way. Marvella, telling me she'll be right back. A big man carrying me down a flight of stairs. The smell of blood. A white woman in a shimmering blue pantsuit arguing with a white doctor.

And then waking up, feeling scraped and battered and empty. Finding out that I not only got rid of that pregnancy, but all possible pregnancies.

Forever and ever, amen.

Not a dividing line at all. That damn crater opened, right then and there. I don't remember hopping it. But I ended up on the other side, looking back at who I had been, and barely recognizing her.

As soon as I could after the surgeries, I sold everything, put the money my ex, Truman, had left me in his will into interest-bearing accounts that I wouldn't have to think about, and, one bright Sunday morning in early June, got on a bus heading west.

I didn't tell anyone. Not my friends. Not my family.

I just vanished.

Or rather, my body vanished.

I had disappeared a long, long time ago.