The Reckoning

Detroit, 1965. Seventeen For Sale signs in a dead man's station wagon. A vacant house on a block where the neighbors are selling scared and buying desperate.

Detective John Braun knows the murder is the least of the crimes. The investigation uncovers an institutional machine that buys homes from panicking white families at fire-sale prices and resells them to Black families on predatory contracts designed to fail - a blockbusting enterprise that profits from racial fear on both sides of the color line.

The evidence leads from a dead real estate speculator to a statewide operation run by a man whose phone number connects to the same power structure Braun has been mapping for five years. But dismantling the machine might harm the very families it exploits - because the predatory contracts are the only door open to Black homeownership in a city that has locked every other one.

When the department orders Braun to stay in his lane, he takes the case federal. The cost is everything he's built - his badge, his standing, his family's sense of safety. But the evidence is a shadow burned into concrete, and shadows outlast the institutions that cast them.

The Reckoning is the fourth novel in The Braun Cases, a five-book series following John Braun through 1960s Detroit.