Outskirts Press, INC.

The 1960s. An America on edge--the cold war, race riots, Vietnam. A frozen Midwestern Air Force town. A pair of gruesome sex murders. A black airman on trial. Will justice or bigotry prevail?

For Tony Jeffries, it’s a double-edged sword: a surprise promotion to captain in his first weeks as an Air Force JAG—and, right on its heels, an appointment as defense counsel in a near-unwinnable case. Two local women have been brutally raped and murdered, and the evidence points squarely at George Torrance, a black airman with a checkered past. The town’s and the base’s bigwigs are determined to make him pay. A slick veteran JAG is heading the prosecution. But is Torrance guilty, or is an innocent man being railroaded? The more Jeffries learns, the less certain he becomes. So does the reader, riding the twists and turns of the court-martial and its aftermath until the shocking final pages. Based on his own experiences as a young JAG, Russell Pelton’s The Sting of the Blue Scorpion—an edge-of-your-seat follow-up to his acclaimed The Dance of the Sharks—upholds the verdict: here’s an authoritative, highly entertaining legal storyteller.