Father Divine's Bikes
FATHER DIVINE'S BIKES (Finalist in 2018 International Book Awards in Cross-Genre Fiction) exposes the dark underbelly of 1945 Newark, New Jersey; a city that boomed during World War II but finds itself unable to cope with the peace that brings joblessness, despair and crime. As deeply-entrenched white enclaves are squeezed by the mass migration of blacks, escape routes for poor ethnic whites rapidly close. Two Catholic altar boys living in a world ripe for grifters, like Father Divine, soon learn that his promise of heaven on earth has hellish consequences.
In the autumn of 1945, a battle erupts when the city's competing mobs end their truce. When it gets bloody, other criminal forces poise to move in. Black bookies, using Father Divine's controversial International Peace Mission Movement as a front, recruit Joey Bancik and Richie Maxwell to run numbers under the guise of newspaper routes.
The boys' families welcome the few bucks they can put on the table. Meanwhile, their parish priest and two homicide detectives fear the numbers racket will entrap the boys in a world of crime.
Turf wars, murders, and a corrupt police department in bed with the mob form a dark and gritty backdrop against a story of post-war Newark and the violence that permeated it.
Steve Bassett was born and raised in Newark's crime-ridden Third Ward and, although far removed during a career as a multiple award-winning journalist, he has always been proud of the sobriquet Jersey Guy. He has been legally blind for almost a decade, but hasn't let this handicap slow him down. Readers will share insights that earned him three Emmys for investigative documentaries, and the California Bar Association's first Medallion Award for Distinguished Reporting on the Administration of Justice.
During his tenure as an Urban Affairs investigative reporter for the Associated Press, he covered urban unrest extensively. In 1967, Newark was devastated by one of the deadliest race riots during that turbulent decade. More than twenty persons were killed and entire neighborhoods reduced to ashes, including the one where he grew up. When he returned to Newark, he was sickened by what he saw. Everything was gone. How did this happen? His novel exposes how accepted crime and corruption would inevitably lead to death and destruction.
Polish on his mother's side and Montenegrin on his father's, with grandparents who spoke little or no English, his early outlook was ethnic and suspicious. It was a world in which cabbage, potatoes, sausage and heavy homemade dumplings reigned, and inspired the setting for Father Divine's Bikes.
He has written two nonfiction books: one published by Ashley Books, "The Battered Rich," and "Golden Ghetto: How the Americans and French Fell In and Out of Love During the Cold War," published by Red Hen Press under its Xeno imprint.
He lives in Placitas, New Mexico with his wife, Darlene Chandler Bassett.
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