It Takes Two

The shooting deaths of a white man and a black man in a Fort Myers, Fla., motel spell trouble for secret lovers Bud Wright, a police detective, and Dan Ewing, the manager of a tony hotel, in It Takes Two, Elliott Mackle's first novel. Set in 1949, this mystery, with its authentic background (the author is the son of a leading Florida developer from the 1940s to the '70s), explores the changes in attitudes toward race and sex engulfing the South in the aftermath of WWII.