University Thugs: The Novel (PB) (2021)

For ex-offender Titus Stevenson, a return to college should've been a breakthrough in the transition back to society. But he arrives at a campus hardly in the mood for healing--it's on the verge of tearing itself apart.

A string of racial scandals have battered the school's reputation. Every weekend bad blood between partygoers, athletes, and townies erupts into all-out brawls. A booming drug trade spurs aggressive police crackdowns. And just as tensions with law enforcement have reached their peak, a serial rapist re-emerges after years of inactivity.

Determined to graduate at year's end and enter a top law school, Titus wants nothing more than to put the past behind him. But the details of his violent conviction surface, and his quiet life as a student crumbles. Now a powerful dean wants him gone. A feud with the football team has him cooped up in his apartment. Maybe an old love will work out this time around, but something doesn't feel quite right.

He's got one year left to set things straight. When progress doesn't come fast enough, old demons return, threatening to derail his life forever--and it just might push the campus over the edge.

University Thugs is a story of redemption and reinvention in an unforgiving world. On one level, it poses broad questions about the transformative power of higher education. Yet University Thugs is undoubtedly a book with heart. It offers a frank, deeply-felt portrait of young people throwing themselves headlong into dreams, and their loyalties to one another when things don't go as planned. Told in a kinetic style across multiple perspectives, the novel takes the reader on an emotional journey--through hope, despair, tenderness, rage, and all points in between.