Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Can a nineteen year old ‘Confidential Informant’ in Philadelphia ever hope to win a power struggle between cops and gangs?
Canary
What you need to know before your trail
Sarie Holland was never the kind of teenager that you would think would even know of Confidential informants let alone be one. She’s a straight A student, doesn’t even drink that much and some would say one of the quiet ones. But then it’s always those you should look out for – for when she is caught up doing a favour for a friend she’s just met and is caught by the police, things don’t look good.
She doesn’t want to ruin a perfectly good future so agrees to become a CI – a confidential informant. And she shines. Catching criminal is what she realises she is good at.
However she hadn’t banked on the power struggle ranging between corrupt police officers and shady gangs.
Travel Guide
Being caught helping out a guy you barely know and getting caught by the drugs police to save his skin, is perhaps not the best way to get sucked into working in the Philadelphia underworld. A deal for a deal right? But then one piece of information leads to another and Sarie is dropped head first into a world of danger and the unknown.
From the safety and clean living to a world of drugs and crime – quite a shift – and its the Philadelphia badlands which make up the main setting for a story of hunting drug dealers in the mean and dark streets of the city.
The Badlands are an area of Philadelphia that reveal the decay, brutal almost post-apocalyptic stage where drugs gangs roam and police hunt them down. This is a very real area of the city and this is darker than its underbelly for this is where drugs gangs rule and the ravaged streets bear witness to that.
The area of North Philadelphia – around the streets of Kensington Avenue to the east and Broad Street to the west seem to be a rough impression of where these neighbourhoods lie. Where Sarie now has to work. This place has history and one that Sarie hopes she will not be part of.
The author is from the city himself and it shows. Language, nuances of character and the sense that you are walking the streets with him and his characters. Canary’s Detective Ben Wildey is the man who wants to clean the city up – after all his grandfather did this job once. Call it a family tradition.
Where Next?
