Brooklyn Motto

New York City, 1998. New York is changing around Nico Kelly, and he can feel more coming. What little middle class there was is disappearing, long-standing factories are moving out and taking their reliable neighbourhood jobs with them, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani's police force has the streets in a stranglehold.

Nico is a private investigator and a self-proclaimed photographer, stuck in a loop of city contracts and self-loathing. He spends his days looking for fraudsters and photographing municipal employees on disability claims. He spends his nights trying to shake the nagging feeling that his day job makes him a professional snitch — traversing dive bars, playing pinball, fighting through hungover mornings and blurry evenings. Pushing thirty and feeling split between his American and Latin heritage, between youth and adulthood, he finds himself at a precipice: who is he, and what should he become?

Then, in the middle of an insurance fraud investigation, Nico witnesses and records a murder. Bodies start to turn up around him and he is forced into solving a mystery he never asked to solve. Brooklyn Motto is the debut novel of filmmaker and screenwriter Alex R. Johnson, and it takes Nico's search for what it means to be human through the deepest and darkest parts of the city.