Extreme Prejudice

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Matt, Cathy, Susan and George have all flown to Pittsburgh for some kind of Newcomer media gathering. Within minutes after they have left the plane, Sikes is fighting with three Purists who are those who hate Newcomers. Keep in mind that there are still very few Newcomers living other than in California, so the Purist hate in the Eastern portion of the U.S. makes even less sense (if it could make any sense at all, actually.)

When the group gets to their hotel, their's more trouble and Cathy is slightly injured. At the first dinner, a protester causes verbal trouble, and another throws a skinned dead monkey on to the Newcomer's table to scare them.

A co-theme to the human prejudice against the Newcomers is the storyline dealing with an Overseer, and the prejudice within the Newcomer ranks themselves while still on the ship, and even afterward.

George and Susan are trying to get some sleep when George gets a phone call, which turns out to be a bomb threat. The Overseer they meet at the convention apparently gets taken by the Purists.

The Purists put out a demand that all Newcomers be taken back to the Mohave desert and kept there. George says that the government would never do that, but an FBI agent there says that the government did it to the Japanese during WWII. This is one of the rare times I find any reference outside of factual books to the internment of persons of Japanese ancestry, including mostly American-born persons of Japanese descent, during WWII.

One of the Newcomer women is killed, her body literally torn to pieces.

(I'm going to guess here that the missing Newcomer was actually part of the murder, perhaps helped by one or two other Newcomers.)

Another Newcomer is murdered, and the chain to his hotel room is still on when George and Matt get there.

Matt gets into a fight with a Newcomer creature, a variation on a bloodhound, basically, called a levpa. It had been used to track escaped Newcomer slaves.

The rest of the novel is spent in the pursuit of the levpa and the person controlling it.

It's a really, really good story, again with a very strong anti-prejudice message. My only criticism would be that it's extremely obvious very early on who the actual criminal is, so there was no surprise when his identity was revealed.



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