Nickel City

Whoever’s tailing him must be… paranoid. A hard-boiled Detroiter starting over in San Francisco after the death of his son and the breakup of his marriage, Mick McCants is busy. He’s got a load of forgetting to do. Shoveling faster and faster to advance the career ahead of him and bury the life behind, he’s drawn into an underground that traffics in women, a drug called Confidence, and a bustling international currency exchange. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 economic crash, McCants’ professional resurgence blinds him to the false fronts put up by his employer, by his office neighbor – guy named Geronimo – by his elusive almost-girlfriend, Amy Huang, and finally, by an investigative agency called Nickel City. Like the banking collapse, McCants’ downfall is all just a question of momentum: when the fronts topple like dominoes, he finds himself alone, broke, in danger, and trapped between his conscience and the law. But so what if he wears Levis with un-hip wingtips? As irrepressible as he is enterprising, McCants connects with a spirited, Triumph-riding fugitive named Lillian (Mercer on her license, Lowry to you). Each is compelled to solve a riddle posed by the past, but neither can do it alone. Together they form the double-sided coin of the American character, and utilizing both ingenuity and evasion, they broker a negotiation between the forces of fake confidence and shorted dreams that conspire to define their era. Set in San Francisco and Oaktown and narrated in the first person, NICKEL CITY is a gritty, smart-assed, eloquent thriller. Don't look back.