Book Club--"Deacon King Kong" by James McBride

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known in the neighborhood as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Causeway Housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range. As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of New York in the late 1960s—overlap in unexpected ways.