BLIP / Idrian N. Resnick (ePub)

BLIP is an American crime story.

Retired NYPD Major Crimes detective Michael Stark, catches it on the midnight news. His best friend and Columbia law school fellow student, African American Jason Baldwin, has been found beaten to a pulp. Where he shouldn't have been: outside a remote subway stop near Howard Beach, Queens, home of the Gambino Crime Family and scene of the infamous 1986 murder of a black man by a teen mob-a hate crime.

Mysteriously, the cops won't investigate Jason's case, dismissing it as a mugging or a drug deal gone bad.

Seeing the deadly assault on Jason as a hate crime, African Americans demonstrate in Howard Beach and are bludgeoned by white residents while the police, ordered by the mayor not to interfere, stand down.

New York City erupts into a paroxysm of racial violence and for the first time in America blacks bring their rage and revenge to white neighborhoods.

Jason lives but is in a coma and his assailants, three Howard Beach teens whose fathers are Gambino lawyers, try to finish the job.

Jason's sister, Amber, pressures Michael to try to find and stop the killers. While the police try to quell the racial wild fires, Michael, with few resources and little information, hunts in a haystack of eight million straws.

Caught in the brutal crossfires of Jason's would-be killers, the racial explosions engulfing the city, his own prejudice and love-hate loyalty to cop brotherhood, Michael unexpectedly falls in love with Amber. Their families' feelings about race, gender and cops stop romance cold. Almost.

BLIP raises one of the most critical issues of our time: can people of different races and ethnicities live in peace with one another?