The Bookstore The Trent Jackson Collection

Maverick Williams is twenty, Black, gay, overweight, outspoken—and still trying to figure out what it means to choose himself.

Set against the language, music, friendships, family complications, and emotional chaos of early-2000s Los Angeles, At This Moment follows Maverick as he moves through love, sex, faith, insecurity, friendship, and the uncomfortable space between the person he is and the person everyone else seems to expect him to become.

Sharp-tongued and emotionally exposed, Maverick wants connection but often discovers that being wanted is not the same as being valued. As complicated relationships test his confidence and old wounds follow him into new situations, he begins confronting a harder truth: the acceptance he keeps demanding from other people may never replace the work of accepting himself.

Raw, funny, profane, vulnerable, and deeply personal, At This Moment is a coming-of-age novel about learning that adulthood does not arrive with answers—and that sometimes the most important relationship you will ever build is the one you have with yourself.

Maverick Williams thought he had learned his lesson.

After surviving the family wounds, insecurities, and complicated relationships that nearly consumed him in At This Moment, Maverick is approaching twenty-one determined to move forward. College is almost behind him, a career in television journalism is finally within reach, and for once, the future looks like something he might actually control.

Then life starts circling back. A chance encounter with the handsome and emotionally complicated Gavin draws Maverick into another relationship with no easy definition. Old loves resurface. New possibilities emerge. Friendship, sex, grief, ambition, and desire collide as Maverick begins to realize that recognizing your patterns does not necessarily mean you have stopped repeating them.

Set against early-2000s Los Angeles, Full Circle is raw, funny, provocative, and emotionally unapologetic: a story about a young Black gay man trying to understand the difference between being loved, being wanted, and finally being secure enough to choose what is right for himself.

Regina Williams knows how to clean up a mess.

As a seasoned HR professional, she has built her career walking into chaos with a polished smile, sharp instincts, and the kind of restraint dangerous people mistake for weakness. She knows how to read a room. She knows how to document a lie. She knows how to survive people who abuse power and still call themselves leaders.

Then she walks into Sovereign Efforts. Behind the doors of the Los Angeles day program, Evelyn Pierce rules like a bitter queen in designer lipstick—watching everyone through cameras, weaponizing fear, and protecting a family legacy rotten enough to poison the walls. What looks like a respectable care facility is really a kingdom of secrets, silence, and survival, where loyalty is demanded, truth is punished, and the wrong woman is always expected to take the fall.

As detectives circle, employees whisper, enemies resurface, and decades of buried betrayal claw their way back into the light, everyone starts asking the same question: who wanted Evelyn Pierce punished? The better question is—who didn’t?

Slick, brutal, darkly funny, and impossible to look away from, Clean Getaway pulls back the curtain on a city where survival is performance, revenge can look like justice, and cameras do not always catch the truth.

Marlon Jermaine Strickland Jr. knows how institutions bury people.

He built a career in Washington studying power, managing crises, and recognizing the difference between an employee problem and a system protecting itself. He returns to Gary, Indiana, for one reason: to bury his grandmother and settle her estate. But Carolyn’s death leaves him with more than paperwork. Marlon inherits his family home—the Strickland House—which carried more secrets than he knew and the responsibility of deciding what happens to it next.

Then an unexpected encounter with an old friend after the funeral turns Marlon’s attention toward Birchwood Yards, the town’s largest employer. What begins as curiosity leads him into its Employee Relations department and the private machinery of a company that has shaped Gary for generations.

Inside the family-run empire, loyalty outranks policy, personal relationships shape professional decisions, and the rules change depending on who needs protection. Marlon’s experience makes him valuable—until he begins noticing too much. His silence is called arrogance. His questions become insubordination. His best work is praised in public and weaponized against him in private.

As Birchwood quietly builds a record designed to make his downfall appear deserved, the Strickland House begins revealing an unfinished family history. Marlon came to Gary to settle an estate. Instead, he will have to decide what is worth protecting, what is worth exposing, and how far he is willing to go when the institution trying to break him discovers that he has been keeping records too.