YZ Print Version Preorder

This book releases on 6/19/2026

Wray Parker did everything right.

Twenty years in the Navy. A Bronze Star. A family that loved him. On an ordinary afternoon in Norfolk, Virginia, he reached for his registration during a traffic stop — and was shot three times by Officer Ben McHolland.

The DA declined to prosecute. The investigation went cold. The city moved on.

The Parker family did not.

Yara Parker reads the news every night from behind an anchor desk, her grief pressed flat beneath a professional smile. Her cousin Z fixes cars and says little. Together, they have watched the system decide — clearly, repeatedly, without apology — that Wray's life was not worth pursuing.

So they decide something too.

When DA Susan Blakely is found dead in her Ghent home — a quarter placed deliberately on her forehead — Norfolk erupts. The police investigate. The media speculates. And Yara Parker sits behind her anchor desk and reports on her own secret.

But Blakely is only the first quarter.

YZ is a novel about what a family does when the courts won't. About the cost of grief that has nowhere legal to go. About a thirteen-year-old girl who sees everything and has to decide what to do with what she knows. And about a grieving husband — a Marine — who is hunting the people responsible for his wife's death, and slowly coming to understand why they did it.

This book does not look away. Neither will you.

Perfect for readers of urban fiction, literary crime, and stories that ask the questions everyone else is afraid to ask.