Trouble the Saints

Trouble the Saints is set in New York on the eve of the Second World War, in a history where a few people of color are born with saints' hands, gifts that give them strange and particular skills. Phyllis LeBlanc's gift is for knives, which she throws with uncanny, lethal skill. She is a light skinned Black woman passing as white, and she works as an assassin for a white mob boss, Russian Victor, killing the men he tells her deserve it. To do it she has given up her own past and Dev Patil, the man she loved.

The book comes in three parts, told in turn by Phyllis, Dev and Tamara. Phyllis learns that one of her victims was innocent, and Dev, half Indian and a police informant whose hands warn him of danger to anyone he touches, comes back into her life; it is Dev who finally kills Victor. The two flee upstate to Dev's childhood home, where they are drawn into a feud between a white family and a young Black man with gifts of his own, and racial violence follows them there. Tamara, Phyllis's best friend, is a snake dancer whose cards show her the future. Dev is drafted, the two marry before he leaves, and he is killed in the war. Phyllis, pregnant and losing control of her gift, goes into labor and is turned away from a segregated hospital, and she dies giving birth. The book ends with Tamara rocking Phyllis's daughter and reading Dev's last letter.

The main crime plot is over early, and most of the novel is about what violence costs afterward, which will surprise readers expecting a noir thriller to the end. Johnson writes in a rich, musical style, and the book asks for close attention. Kirkus praised its "musical prose" and its "nuanced portrait of racism." It suits readers of Colson Whitehead or Walter Mosley.