Set in East Texas, the state’s nearest relation to the Deep South, Praise at Midnight introduces a lively cast of small-town characters. Alice Palmer, Shipley’s black mistress, carves out her own niche on the other side of the tracks. Evelyn Doucette Joiner, the night clerk at the motel owned by the deceased, becomes the star witness and dreams of escaping to Houston once the trial is over. Like young Evelyn, the Judge can’t wait to leave San Bernardo behind. Genie Summer, the widow who runs the drugstore, harbors a past as a Communist and causes fits when she makes the jury pool. Owen O’Toole is the FBI agent who keeps an eye on the trial for the feds. Comic relief comes in the form of the two retirees who sit on the town square, swapping rumors and gossip. Over all hovers the ghost of the dead man — Ed Covey — who wasn’t exactly the town’s best-loved citizen.
	With the town’s most prominent lawyer, Hayden Shipley, stepping in as special prosecutor and the Judge counting off the years until he can score an appointment to the Court of Appeals, the Ellis case looks like a slam-dunk conviction. The case threatens to explode the uneasy balance of power between the town’s white and black communities. But then the town’s lone Communist becomes an alternate on the jury, and Mermann stumbles upon some of the town’s long-kept secrets. And San Bernardo is never the same.
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