Brooklyn Motto

By: Alex R. Johnson

Narrated by: Bobby Daniel Rodriguez

Fans of Richard Price, Charlie Huston, and Jonathan Lethem will love this coming-of-age New York-centric detective noir debut from esteemed filmmaker and screenwriter Alex R. Johnson.

New York City, 1998. New York is changing around Nico Kelly, and he can feel more coming.

A private investigator and self-proclaimed photographer, Nico is stuck in a loop of city contracts and self loathing. What little middle class there was is disappearing—long-standing factories are moving out and taking their reliable neighborhood jobs with them, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani's police force has the streets in a stranglehold.

Nico spends his days looking for fraudsters while taking photos of municipal employees on disability claims. He spends his nights trying to get rid of the nagging feeling that his day job makes him a professional snitch-traversing dive bars, playing pinball, and fighting through the haze of hungover mornings and blurry evenings.

Pushing thirty years old and feeling split between his American and Latin heritage, between youth and adulthood, Nico finds himself at a precipice—who is he, and what should he become?

When Nico witnesses and records a murder during one of his insurance fraud investigations, bodies start to turn up all around him and he's forced into solving a mystery he didn't ask to solve. Humorous, gritty, and real, Nico's search for what it means to be human takes him through the deepest and darkest parts of New York City.

©2024 Alex R. Johnson (P)2025 Alex R. Johnson