An 18-year-old uncovers a buried history of racial violence in Mobile.
A multiracial family returns to Mobile, Alabama, where a 1983 lynching still shapes what nobody in the family will say out loud. Eighteen-year-old Elijah has already looked it up. His family hasn’t discussed it once.
They arrive from the North with distance, money, and the quiet protections of privilege. In Mobile, those protections begin to thin. The past feels closer here—less abstract, more lived—and the divisions it produced remain visible in ways they cannot ignore.
At the center is Elijah, navigating the contradictions of identity, inheritance, and rage. As he pushes deeper into what happened, what begins as a search for understanding starts to slip beyond his control.
Told through multiple voices, Ghost Gun is a debut novel about inheritance, rage, and the distance between remembering and reckoning.