Join us on Sunday November 15th from 3:00- 5 PM for a book signing with Dr. Olaf Kronenman who will present his debut novel Detroit Heroic.
July, 1967: Detroit is burning but the Tigers keep playing. Dr. Matt Drummond starts his internship at the city morgue. Forty-three dead; the three at the Algiers deliberate murders.
As an intern, Matt sees the results of racism, interprofessional medical violence, gunshot wounds, criminal abortions, and neglect. He wants to help the community, but is framed for an illegal abortion death. As Matt goes on the run, pursued by Detroit Homicide, he turns to the Detroit underworld for help.
1968 becomes apocalyptic. And the Tigers keep playing.
Based on real-life experience and his own journey as an intern, Dr. Kroneman brings 1968 to life and questions what making mnoral decisions mean in a time of extreme stress and division.
“Detroit Heroic happened right in front of me — I could see it all from my bedroom window. Bullets flying down the street from the famous Lee Plaza Hotel on W. Grand Blvd and Lawton. I saw National Guardsmen firing into my high school, Northwestern High. I hid out in Reverend Franklin’s church — Aretha’s father. Dr. Kroneman got it right. The riots divided the city. Sports led our way back. We endured and prevailed.”
— Ali Haakim, professional boxer (ranked #8 in the world) and trainer at Detroit’s Kronk Boxing Center“Detroit Heroic, Olaf Kroneman’s ballsy and hilarious hard-boiled novel, follows a young doctor trying to survive in my Motor City hometown right after the 1967 riots, recalling the shady characters of Damon Runyon and Dutch Leonard. A dazzling debut.”
— Susan Shapiro, author of The Byline Bible“The title, Detroit Heroic, comes from Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect, which describes the corrosive influence of powerful situational forces that push us toward destructive behavior — and lauds the few who, in such settings, remain morally intact. He calls them heroes. My protagonist strives to remain on the side of the angels.”
— Olaf Kroneman
About the Author
Dr. Olaf Kronenman was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. He came of age there — living through the 1967 riots and the Algiers Motel incident, events that sent him searching to understand racism. At sixteen he took up boxing and fought in the Detroit Golden Gloves.
He attended Michigan State University through the 1960s and ’70s, graduating from the MSU College of Human Medicine in 1977 with an MD. He interned at the Mayo Clinic, completed a residency in internal medicine at the University of Virginia, and a fellowship in kidney disease and clinical nutrition at Massachusetts General Hospital under a Harvard appointment.
He has practiced medicine in Detroit since 1983, and his patients and colleagues inspire — and sometimes disturb — his fiction. “I tell stories of mystery and suspense; it’s fun. I draw on my long career in the practice of medicine. I like to tell a good story, but I would also like to expose the reader to a pernicious and perhaps unalterable change in healthcare: the domination of the doctor–patient relationship by computers and bureaucrats.”
His short fiction has won the Winning Writers Sports Fiction and Essay Contest (“Fight Night”) and the Writer’s Digest short story competition (“The Recidivist”), and earned a 2010 Pushcart Prize nomination (“A Battlefield Decision”). His debut novel, Detroit Heroic, is published by Heliotrope Books. He lives in Birmingham, Michigan.