The Wire meets Colson Whitehead in this audacious, darkly funny and dazzlingly innovative literary crime masterpiece about a black police officer in Atlanta, Georgia – and the fatal shooting of a suspect
‘Endlessly entertaining’ Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird
‘Johnson asks big questions about identity, corruption and American ideals’
TIME, Most Anticipated Books of 2026
George Washington Jonson has been in the Atlanta police force for a decade, patrolling the streets he grew up on and managing to build relationships within the force – especially with Tucker, the veteran police officer and self-described ‘redneck’ who taught Jonson the ropes.
Now it’s 2005 and Jonson himself is tasked with training hot-headed rookie recruits. One night out on patrol with his trainee, Utner, a split-second confrontation with a white teenager takes a violent turn and Utner shoots the teenager dead. As the resulting furore mounts to a fever pitch, it threatens to expose the complex nest of lies that seethes beneath the entire city, and order must be restored.
So far, so Hollywood.
But then a dizzying somersault in the novel’s structure upends the narrative and begins an even darker, more complicated and provocative story about racism, power and corruption – building to an unforgettable portrait of a nation divided.
‘Endlessly entertaining’ Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird
‘Johnson asks big questions about identity, corruption and American ideals’
TIME, Most Anticipated Books of 2026
George Washington Jonson has been in the Atlanta police force for a decade, patrolling the streets he grew up on and managing to build relationships within the force – especially with Tucker, the veteran police officer and self-described ‘redneck’ who taught Jonson the ropes.
Now it’s 2005 and Jonson himself is tasked with training hot-headed rookie recruits. One night out on patrol with his trainee, Utner, a split-second confrontation with a white teenager takes a violent turn and Utner shoots the teenager dead. As the resulting furore mounts to a fever pitch, it threatens to expose the complex nest of lies that seethes beneath the entire city, and order must be restored.
So far, so Hollywood.
But then a dizzying somersault in the novel’s structure upends the narrative and begins an even darker, more complicated and provocative story about racism, power and corruption – building to an unforgettable portrait of a nation divided.
Reviews
In T. Geronimo Johnson's Atlanta, racial tensions percolate and the system rarely bends to demands for justice. In his latest novel, the author of Welcome to Braggsville, a National Book Award finalist, explores the moral calculus of a Black cop who's implicated in the killing of a white teenager. In a narrative that unfolds over two decades, Johnson asks big questions about identity, corruption, and American ideals
No one is having more fun with language than T. Geronimo Johnson. The way his mind works is endlessly entertaining, inviting us into a fantasia. Of men behaving badly in a world behaving worse. Of walking broken hearts with guns. Men, who are somehow, still, trying to bridge a cultural gap, to move toward some understanding, a shared humanity. Johnson's take on history, his political commentary, and humor read like jazz, as, with this book in particular, he plays with the novel as a form, bending notes, making new music