Crown

She built more than a beauty business. She built a system people depended on. Now someone is pulling at the foundation.

For nineteen years, Yolanda "Queen" Pryor has built an empire on Chicago's South Side.

Eleven beauty supply stores. Four salons. More than one hundred employees. A network of customers, stylists, suppliers, friends, and families who know that when Queen says she will handle something, she handles it.

Her influence reaches far beyond the register.

Then a routine bank deposit triggers an enhanced review.

For the first time in nineteen years, one of Queen's accounts has been flagged, and she immediately understands that something has started somewhere without her.

Soon a federal grand jury subpoena arrives.

It names eleven business entities.

Nine of them are not in Queen's name.

And only four people alive know how they all fit together.

As federal investigators begin reconstructing years of transactions, invoices, relationships, and loyalties, Queen must confront the uncomfortable truth about the empire she created. The stores are real. The jobs are real. The people who depend on them are real. But so are the hidden arrangements that helped everything survive.

Her daughter Imani sees numbers her mother hoped she would never understand. Old allies begin making decisions of their own. A younger businessman sees opportunity in Queen's vulnerability. And people who have spent years benefiting from her protection must decide what loyalty is worth when the government starts asking questions.

Queen knows what prison can take.

What she does not know is whether protecting the empire she built will destroy the very community she built it for.

CROWN is a gripping literary suspense novel about Black entrepreneurship, beauty and culture, family, federal investigations, money, power, loyalty, and the complicated systems people build when the official ones were never built for them.

Perfect for readers who enjoy powerful female protagonists, family business dramas, sophisticated crime fiction, African American literary fiction, financial intrigue, and morally complex stories where right and wrong are separated by far less than anyone wants to admit.

Beauty built the business. Loyalty built the empire. Now Queen has to decide what the crown is worth. BUY IT NOW!!!