Balancing ACT

Elise Jeffries's first day on the job as media spokesperson for ScanTron International Security begins with a 4:15 a.m. phone call from her boss, who informs her that the company's Tide County chemical storage facility has gone up in flames. As Elise races toward the scene, leaving her husband, Blake, and son, Junior, asleep in their quiet Houston suburb, she also heads back into her past: the ScanTron conflagration has jumped the road separating it from Flatwoods, the working-class black community where she grew up. The blaze ignites a block of modest bungalows and injures several residents. The TV reporter covering the community disaster is Carlos Rico, who nearly destroyed Elise's professional and personal life several years earlier. Enmeshed in a nightmare of conflicting loyalties, Elise discovers that Flatwoods's residents, including her childhood friend Damita, suffer from mysterious illnesses. Carlos wants Elise's help in uncovering the secret behind ScanTron, a collaboration in which she would have to trust him and possibly expose her new boss. Damita urgently suggests that the foul-smelling creek running from ScanTron through her property is the cause of her cancer. As she investigates, Elise finds her job, marriage, family and her very life at risk. While the issues echo newspaper headlines of recent years, Bunkley's (Wild Embers) sharp and absorbing page-turner neatly takes on the tangled issue of corporate environmental abuse and its impact on a small black community. (July)