This is a rich, absorbing novel about good, evil, and the inability of the legal system to mediate between the two. Two white Milwaukee motorcycle cops pursue and kill a young black man on a bitterly cold winter night in 1959 and with the help of their superiors escape detection for twenty years. When at last the truth comes out -- first in a confession and then in a ground-breaking civil rights suit brought against the state by the victim's family many people find their present lives increasingly altered by this event from the past. This includes Milwaukee Times reporter Bob Joseph, mayoral candidate Andy Hedig, Hedig's wife Sarah, lawyer Charlie Simon, the sister of the murdered youth, and many more. Written in lean, evocative prose, Color of Law is a profoundly ambitious novel that renders precisely an American City and the lives that are lived there.