The Empowerment Mall is pleased to introduce "Middle Ground"

From an award-winning international business reporter comes a sizzling tale of suspense and romance spun on three continents.

Shayna McWright is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. When her mother, the first Black U.S. ambassador to Belgium, dies in a car crash, Shayna learns that the late ambassador was her adoptive mother. Her biological parents are a Peace Corps worker who wanted nothing to do with her and a Congolese woman who left her as an infant on the doorstep of the American Embassy in Kinshasa, capital of the Congo. Shayna travels to Africa to find her birth mother. In her search she discovers that the ambassador's death was no accident.

Crispin Abeli is a maverick Congolese entrepreneur bent on beating the world's economic powers at their own game. He reluctantly grants Shayna an interview in Kinshasa. Neither he nor Shayna is aware of his link to Shayna's natural mother.

Amina Milenga is a half-Congolese, half-Caribbean psychotherapist who divides her time between New York and Kinshasa. She takes Shayna under her wing in Kinshasa. Despite her vow never to fall in love again, she falls for Crispin, the country's most eligible bachelor.

From strife-torn Africa to the power corridors of the CIA, to the private circles of privileged Black America, Middle Ground is a story of individuals driven by their deepest fears and ambitions. Life, they all learn, is about challenging one's comfort zone, about overcoming one's demons, about finding middle ground.
 

Rosalind Kilkenny McLymont is the editor in chief of The Network Journal, a magazine for Black professionals and business owners, and a partner in McLymont, Kunda & Co., international trade and business development strategists. An award-winning journalist, she has a master’s degree in journalism from New York University, a bachelor’s in French from the City College of New York, a certificate in Spanish language and literature from the University of Madrid, and a black belt in Tai Chi from Ming’s Tai Chi Academy. Born in Guyana on March 15, 1951, she migrated to the United States in 1965 and lived in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1973 to 1980. She currently resides in Valley Cottage, N.Y., with her husband and three of their children.