What if your parents taught you that thievery was as American as apple pie? What if your family's hero was the crooked railroad financier Tom Durant? What if your father drove to work dressed in a yellow linen suit and string tie, hired the school janitor to be his partner, and drummed up investment capital from the local Mafia?Then you would be Jack Acheson, the protagonist of Whitney Terrell's new novel, The King of Kings County. Jack begins his tale in the 1950s, when his father, Alton Acheson, is busy conning local farmers out of their land on the outskirts of Kansas City. From there he charts his father's attempt to build a suburban empire in rural Kings County through the giddy land rush of the '60s and '70s to the vast corporate campuses of the present day. It's a novel of youth, of football games and prep school rituals. It's a history of real estate barons and racial covenants, of color lines and highway building. And it's also the story of a father and son who are more similar than they care to admit.Throughout, Terrell weaves an intensely private portrait of Jack's entire life, a fifty-year arc through the heart of the American dream. In it, we meet the math-whiz son of a mob accountant, John Birch-crazed ranchers, and blockbusting black real estate agents. We learn of Jack's first love, Geanie Bowen, the redheaded, improbably progressive daughter of the city's greatest developer, who protests apartheid from her father's crumbling estate. And how Jack, in his fifties, remains haunted by one particular event that he and Geanie witnessed in a quarry during their junior year of high school - a secret that eventually forces him into a clear-eyed confrontation with the true consequences of his father's legacy. Read Less