Whitney Terrell is a 33-year-old writer in residence at Rockhurst University. This summer Viking published his first novel, The Huntsman. Plot-wise it's a standard mystery: A prominent judge's daughter has been murdered, and the wrong man's headed for the fall. But the judge's daughter was a white debutante, the suspect is a young black man and the novel is set in Kansas City -- so the real tension builds along the two sides of Troost Avenue. In addition to laying out our town's embarrassing racial divide with nauseating familiarity, Terrell captures the city's insidious -- deadly, even -- habit of say-nothing politeness. Worse -- and better -- yet, the judge's affair with his daughter is a perfect metaphor for Kansas City's incestuous power structure. Terrell even gets the rain right: "Like everything in this city, the rain lacked power and clarity: it had no flash and thunder, felled no trees or power lines. It instead was a leak, a drip, a kind of rot that innumerable rainfall tables had failed to dramatize ... It seemed not to fall so much as to drift, sometimes sideways, sometimes even upward, billowing away in spectacular, winglike buffets from the windscreens of the cars trundling south down Grand Avenue.... It swirled about the high glass walls of the American Phone Company Building downtown and dusted the backs of trucks in the deep canyons of the interstate, the drivers complacent in their high seats, eyeing the city's snarl of steel and concrete as they steered for the plains."