Fiction. A Marcus Johnson Thriller. Book Two.
Marcus Johnson came home to Sweetwater Beach to help his father run a garage. Fourteen months later, he is under a Buick on the lift when he notices the For Sale signs going up on blocks where nobody was selling. Palmetto Flats has been a Black neighborhood for sixty years. Now, a company nobody has heard of is buying it six blocks at a time, and the people who say no start getting noise complaints, health inspections, and cracked windshields.
A sixteen-year-old girl has been writing all of it down in a pocket notebook because no one else thought to. What the county paperwork calls an industrial development is a four-hundred-bed federal detention facility. The money behind it runs back through a Cayman shell to a family trust in Bolivia, and from there to the network Marcus helped take apart the year before. Someone kept what was left of it and pointed it at a neighborhood.
The people who can prove it are a chief deputy who found his valve stem pulled in his own department lot, a journalist who runs a café and files her real work upstairs, a law student who is not a lawyer yet, and an analyst who has been building the same map for seven years. The firm on the other side does not have to beat them in court. It only has to make Marcus a complicated story before the journalist can tell a clean one.
His VA records are sealed. Sealed is not the same as safe.
New to the series? Start with Book One, Sweetwater Reckoning.
More from Wayne: Sweetwater Reckoning, Until the Well Runs Dry, and The Unseen March. Back to all books.