GODS & GANGSTERS

Violent crime and romantic jealousy entangle a rising rap group in this urban thriller.

Longtime friends Power, Kane, Messiah, Lil’ Earl, and Ty Five$ call themselves Q.B.C., short for Queens Boro Crew, having grown up in the projects there. When Power and Kane form a hip-hop group, they naturally dub it Q.B.C. and continue criminal activities with the crew while making quite a name for themselves recording for Paul Duppy of Notorious Records. At the age of 17, Power gets off on a murder charge when Kane and Messiah gun down the cop planning to testify against him. The crew travels to North Carolina on a tip from Lil’ Earl’s cousin Tyrone “Ty” Braswell, who knows of an easily burgled pawnshop with a large stash of guns. But things go sideways when Ty mistakenly leaves DNA behind; three years later, a nightclub shooting is traced to the robbery, leading to the arrest of Q.B.C. members. A rising star at Notorious Records is Egypt Moore, who’s talented, sexy—and an undercover cop. She’s been tasked with infiltrating the music world because Xavier Montenegro, commonly known as The Colombian, is laundering drug money through rap labels. Egypt and Power soon begin a relationship that, while hot and heavy, deepens into something more. Nevertheless, as part of her job, Egypt must pretend to betray Power with Kane, causing bad blood between the men and breaking up Q.B.C. Power begins a solo career; Egypt becomes a worldwide success; and Duppy heads for a fall, but not before exerting his power to humiliate women. Meanwhile, The Colombian is holding all the strings, manipulating the players toward his own secretive ends.

In his latest crime novel, SLMN offers a complex plot that jumps backward and forward in time from an anchoring narrative in which two White detectives interrogate a Black suspect who’s at first unnamed. The hip-hop scene is reflected in several elements; the chapters are called tracks, for example, and are accompanied by symbols for pause, rewind, play, and other functions. Also reflective of some trends in rap music is the story’s hardcore pornographic and usually misogynistic sex together with the merciless, graphic violence that’s vividly—for some readers, too vividly—described (“Messiah sat on Peanut’s legs and without hesitation, plunged the red hot curler straight up his ass….When Messiah extracted the curling iron, the putrid smell of hot shit and blood instantly filled the room to a nauseating level. Green diarrhea ran from Peanut’s ass like a cracked sewer”). The sense of peering into a powerful world unknown to most readers gives the story a compelling hook, and the high-octane plot gains authenticity from SLMN’s mastery of street slang in dialogue like “They all gonna be tryin’ to speak the thun language. What the drilly wit’ that tho!” But keeping track of the storylines can be difficult even with cues. For example, after an interrogation scene, Track 3 skips around considerably: 10 years earlier, present day, six months earlier, five years earlier, present day, 15 years earlier, 10 years later, eight years later, and present day.

A strong, if sometimes confusing, tale of operatic moral corrosion.