The Confessions of Matthew Strong

African American philosophy professor Allegra “Allie” Douglass, the narrator of this arresting first novel from professor Power-Greene (a specialist in African American social and political movements), is contacted by the NYPD when one of her grad students, Cynthia Wade, goes missing. Shortly thereafter, at a dinner celebrating her appointment to the Eli Jefferson Chair of Philosophy at New York’s Christopher Columbus University, she meets Jefferson’s nephew, Wallace, who comes off as a racist, and the even creepier Matthew Strong, who calls Allie “the smartest one of your kind.” That same evening, her grandmother dies in Alabama. Allie travels there for the funeral, where she focuses on her family and her late grandmother’s efforts to help a local group of mothers of missing girls and young women. Building on her grandmother’s work and the research of others for her grandmother, Allie finds connections to Cynthia’s disappearance. From the start, readers know Allie will eventually be kidnapped by Strong, who forces her “to write his white supremacist mission to redeem the South.” The bad guys may be caricatures, but Power-Greene (Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement) tells a moving crime tale that’s all too timely. Agent: Sarah Bedingfield, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary. (Oct.)