YUSUF BLANTON

"Welcome to Cordova. The neon is cheap, the rent is weekly, and the shadows will eat you alive."

Andy Blackwell is a bisexual hip-hop artist running from Maryland to the neon lights of the West. Sakeenah Bailey is a bipolar, trans Muslima writer fleeing conservative Connecticut. Both drown in the legalized haze and criminal underworld of Cordova. Traded between kingpins and corporate weed factories, they are two sides of the same counterfeit coin. One will find a ladder out of the pit. The other will become a ghost in the machine.

"In the neon desert of Cordova, survival isn't a right. It’s a heist."

Excommunicated and cast into the gutters, Sakeenah Bailey lands in the crosshairs of Tony Vee, the drug-fueled King of Cordova's flesh empire. But Sakeenah is a poet with a switchblade. Armed with explosive journals and an alliance with a closeted federal deputy, she targets the city's glamorous drag pageant to burn the castle down, recruiting Justice Hawkins, Tony’s top-earning queen, to pull it off.

"The only thing more dangerous than building a neon empire is hiring the absolute idiots required to run it."

Tony Vee is in a federal cage, and Vivienne "The Countess" Belfray's hostile takeover is suffocating under the spectacular incompetence of her own syndicate. Meanwhile, a fiercely repressed federal crusader wages a bloody, off-the-books war to scrub the Boulevard clean, catching a bruised, newly-out ex-deputy in the crossfire. A blisteringly cynical, pitch-black comedy of errors disguised as a neon-noir thriller.