Tommie Simms was supposed to be the community hope, the young man from the neighborhood who made good. He attended a state university, married a respectable woman, and landed a position at a white-collar insurance firm. Watching over Chicago from the thirty-third floor of his company’s downtown high rise, Tommie ignores the gnawing sense that he doesn’t belong on this path—and that in a blink of an eye, he could stray from its given destination. And then he does . . .

Soon Tommie is laid off, and he begins to see himself as just another faceless entity on the city’s fringes. After each fruitless job interview, Tommie’s wife withdraws from him further, and in the mirror he faces

the reflection of failure his family never intended for him. Stymied by rejection and mounting debt, Tommie is seduced into peddling dope as his best opportunity to define himself and to provide for those he loves.

But a corporate job is no preparation for hustling, and when Tommie finds himself on the wrong side of a crooked cop, everyone wants a piece of him: his street-hustling cousins, the police, friends, loan sharks, even

a panderer from his white-collar past. In order to break free, Tommie must find a way to dig himself out of a deepening hole, before the city buries him.

"Tommie Simms is going down the ladder faster than he went up in Ojikutu's second novel (after 47th Street Black). Pushed into college by his addict mother, Tommie finds success working at an insurance company. Living in Chicago's Four Corners neighborhood with wife Tarsha and their baby girl, post-9/11 layoffs hit and Tommie scrambles to find employment. He begins selling marijuana for his cousin Remi and, after his arrest by a corrupt white cop named Weidmann, Tommie arranges a meeting between Remi and Weidmann, who wants in on Remi's action. This infuriates Remi's partner and half brother, Westside Jack. Jack pressures Tommie into helping him set up Weidmann by secretly filming him having sex with an underage girl. Getting deeper into the Chicago underworld, Tommie struggles to find his place-does he belong in the working week or on the streets? Tommie's narration merges urban cynicism with a densely crosshatched, riffing style reminiscent of Leon Forrest. Tommie is a character mentally stuck between two worlds, and his stasis eventually infects the energy of the story, which doesn't resolve so much as wind down." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

When Tommie Simms loses his corporate job, he gets caught up in Chicago's treacherous underworld--the last fate anyone ever intended for him. Ojikutu is the author of "47th Street Black."

BAYO OJIKUTU is the author of 47th Street Black, winner of the Washington Prize for Fiction and the Great American Book Contest. He currently teaches in the department of English at DePaul University. Ojikutu was born and raised in Chicago, where he still lives.