FRAME-UP

FRAME-UP is a two-hander in which one of the point-of-view characters is a homicide detective. The other is a murder suspect. The story is set in New York City. NYPD Homicide detective Samantha “Sam” Ortiz is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic and a single parent. She investigates the homicide of a white cop in a city on edge, its racial tensions inflamed. Yet a suspect soon falls into her lap, and she arrests Will Pruett, a young, black magazine journalist. He astonishes her by claiming that, in concert with his publisher, he’d incriminated himself on purpose to demonstrate how easily racism and a coincidence or two can cost an innocent man his neck. Will soon realizes, however, that the real murderer has framed him for real. Thus, Sam must solve an elaborate mystery under fraught circumstances where race, law enforcement, and politics intersect, while Will must extricate himself from a nightmare, partly of his own making.