African American Crime

Carl Weber brings the best of urban street lit authors together, all telling their own dramatic tales of life in the streets in known cities across the USA. The second installment continues with Treasure Hernandez telling the tale of the Dirty South.

Betrayal. Passion. Redemption. After five long years behind bars for a crime she didn’t commit, Monique “Mo” Carter steps back into the streets of Philadelphia with a heart full of fire and a soul unwilling to break. But the last person she expects to see is Jeremiah “J-Rock” Ellis—the man whose testimony sealed her fate. Once the love of her life, now the source of her deepest betrayal, J-Rock claims he’s a changed man, desperate to right his wrongs and win her back. Despite the bitterness that lingers, Mo can’t ignore the heat that still simmers between them. Their stolen ...

When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules—a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.

A young black woman, Jamila Mosely, is killed, but slain even worse by media coverage that refuses to let her be an innocent victim. Per usual, they air her most questionable photo, and hint at sketchy associations to portray her as a victim to her own devices. Detective Sawyer takes it personal. Sawyer becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth and restoring dignity to the name of a young lady not much older than her daughter Star. And yet there is still the unresolved issues with Chosen, Travis, Duke, and even her struggling marriage to contend; Sawyer has a full plate. Under the ...

When Harlem gets off on a murder charge due to insanity, the asylum he’s sent to feels worse than death, with one exception: the beautiful Nurse Daphane. As their relationship grows, so do the stakes: She has the ability to help him escape, and he has the ability to set her free from her abusive relationship. Yet Harlem has one big secret: He was perfectly sane when he committed his crime. But in the end, Daphane’s own secret may be the deadliest of all....

Often, the old adage goes “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer…” However, what if the one you love is the one you should be hating? Claire is a widowed single mother who just moved to Alabama from the Big Apple. Having stepped out on faith and the ultimatum that her job gave her, the grieving woman is on a quest for a better life for herself and her teenage daughter, Jonna. But… her life is suddenly flipped upside down when Jonna disappears into thin air, and she’s left wondering: WHO, WHAT, WHERE, and WHY? Ultimately, Claire is plagued by the grueling search for her ...

From Richard Wright comes a compelling story of one man's attempt to escape his past and start anew in Harlem. Cross Damon is a man at odds with society and with himself—a man of superior intellect who hungers for peace but who brings terror and destruction wherever he goes. The Outsider is an important work of fiction that depicts American racism and its devastating consequences in raw and unflinching terms. Brilliantly imagined and frighteningly prescient, it is an epic exploration of the tragic roots of criminal behavior.

Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics - and their impact on people of color - are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime.

In 1992, Los Angeles burned. In the aftermath of the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots, a ground-breaking ceremony at the infamous intersection of Florence and Normandie unearths the body of a Korean liquor store owner. Black private eye Ivan Monk searches for the killer—many suspect the motives for the murder were racial. But then another body turns up, and while the FBI and the Rolling Daltons, the largest gang in the city, dog Monk’s trail, Monk questions who the real perpetrators are and whether he can prevent more from dying, including himself, before he uncovers the truth.

Nan's day is not off to a good start. Her on-again, off-again relationship with Walter is off...again, and when she offers a fellow busker a place to stay for the night he ends up murdered on her kitchen floor. To make matters worse, the busker turns out to have been an undercover cop. And his former partner has taken an immediate and extreme dislike to Nan. When she finds that the dead man stashed a wad of cash in her apartment, cash that could go to help his blind girlfriend, Nan's desire to do the right thing lands her in trouble.

When Trenicka denies completing him with that one magic word, Kaedon is left distraught and wounded like never before. But Trenika has her reasons for running away, one in particular that has haunted her life like a dark plague. That dark plague is Romell, who has mysteriously appeared and begins wreaking havoc all across the city. Determined to repay back those who caused him grief, Romell finds himself in the mist of some very vicious killaz. Battling to save the woman they love, Kaedon and Josh are forced to go against the odds. But to get to Trenika many must die, and hell hath no fury ...

A vengeful female ringleader heads an expensive show horse kidnapping operation, selling to the black market. One couple loses a much treasured dressage mount. Will Cajun Magic make it back to his rightful owners? Can the Mob push back against the villain's dark ways?

The allure of the game is calling Raphael by name. The fast life and fast women already corrupted his best friend but Raphael is trying to stand firm. He eventually accepts money from a dangerous dealer and now has to live up to it. A battle wages between good and evil but the lines are blurred. The Camacho clan still runs New York but who runs them? If Raphael can figure that out then he can find who ordered the hit on his father. Good Cop, Bad Cop 4 is filled with twist and turns that will keep you guessing. Raphael is in way over his head now. Flip the page and see if he'll sink or swim....

It was supposed to be easy money. A few exchanges for cash, one big payoff, and then life would be better than ever with bills all paid and money in her pocket. But the plan fell apart and now she's made an enemy. He's a drug cartel leader out to destroy any competition - and get payback by any means necessary....

Smoke Kings is a powerful and propulsive novel with a diverse and unforgettable cast of characters. Like Steph Cha's Your House Will Pay it explores decades of racial tensions through a fictional landscape where the line between justice and revenge is blurred.

After refusing to participate in a police department cover-up involving the death of a young black man, Chicago detective Ashe Cayne is pushed out of the force. But he won’t sit quietly on the sidelines: he’s compelled to fight for justice as a private investigator. When a young woman, Tinsley Gerrigan, goes missing, her wealthy parents from the North Shore hire Cayne to find her. As Cayne looks into her life and past, he uncovers secrets Tinsley’s been hiding from her family. Cayne fears he may never find Tinsley alive.

Meet Marcel and Sabrina, a hitman and a bookkeeper for the Mob. The couple should have never met, let alone fallen in love. When they decide to go against the grain, all hell breaks loose. Somebody wants them dead; they just don't know who. It could be Leo, Marcel's jealous older brother; Othello, Sabrina's crooked father; or it could be The Family, a roundtable of the top contenders in the underworld. There is no honor amongst thieves. Marcel and Sabrina will find the old adage to be true the hard way.

November 9th of 2014 my nephew, Khamani, was born. From the moment I first held him in my arms, I feared for him for the black man that he would one day become. And this is by no means saying I think he won't be great. For that, he is destined. But even on his best day, someone, somewhere will find a problem with who he is at his core; a black man. That frightens me. This book is my attempt at shedding light on many of those fears in the hopes of opening those lines of communication. It is never too soon to speak up or out about social injustice and inequality. This is my stand.

After mysterious homicides of an Atlanta hip hop legend and a med student, the stage is set for the chess match between Detective Aisha Sawyer and a mastermind killer. Sawyer mixes it up with a diverse suspect list, from a world-renowned surgeon to a hip hop vixen scorned. As the death toll rises, Sawyer notices the victims share one immoral trait, which means that their killer is a vigilante, an agent of karma. High stakes, political vendetta, the detective risking the badge for the sake of justice: things you might find in an epic struggle between a mastermind killer and a hardnosed ...

When young queer dancer Wilbess “Bessy” Mulenga is arrested by corrupt police, fresh-from-the-village rookie lawyer Grace Zulu takes up his cause in her first pro bono case. Presented with a freshly beaten client, Grace protests to the police and gets barred from accessing Bessy, who then disappears from the system—and the world—without a trace. As she fights for justice for Bessy, Grace must navigate a dangerous world of corrupt politicians, traditional beliefs, and deep-seated homophobia.