Excursion Report

Arielle Dabney runs ninety refrigerated vans out of a yard on Lamar Avenue, feeding the overnight hub, the only Black-owned validated cold chain courier in Memphis. She is a deacon's daughter who gives nothing away in daylight and everything away in the dark, and she has built an entire life out of things that seal, log and lock.On the hottest night of the year a shipment worth more than her building goes warm in her own yard. It should be a bad night and an insurance claim. It is not. The vials inside were never real, the heat was not an accident, and the only thing anybody is measuring is whether Arielle Dabney writes it down or lets it go.The man who comes to find out is on her night desk by Tuesday and in her bed by Friday, and she tells him the truth about herself before he ever asks her a question, which is exactly what he was sent for.By the time she understands what she has been auditioning for, there is a recording, a family in New Orleans that has never once raised its voice, a chiller her father installed in 1996 and never declared, and one page left to write.A crime erotic thriller.