Fourteen

Fourteen years in federal prison. Fourteen percent of everything he builds. One chance to finally own something nobody can take away.

Amos Lee Gaither has already paid for the life he once lived.

After serving fourteen years in federal prison for a marijuana conspiracy, he returned home to Newark and built something legitimate from the ground up, a commercial laundry, a payroll, a reputation, and a life measured in work instead of promises.

Then New Jersey legalizes cannabis.

Under the state's social equity program, Amos's conviction is no longer simply the thing that kept doors closed. It is one of the reasons he qualifies to walk through a new one.

And on paper, few applicants are stronger.

But winning a cannabis license and financing a cannabis business are two very different things.

Fourteen banks say no.

Then private capital says yes.

The money comes with conditions: twenty two percent interest, a management agreement tied to gross revenue, consent rights over ordinary business decisions, and a structure Amos believes he understands well enough to survive.

At first, it appears to work.

The store opens. Customers come. Revenue climbs. The business becomes everything the promise of legalization was supposed to make possible.

Then Amos begins to understand what the money actually bought.

As taxes, debt, management fees, family loyalties, old relationships, and corporate control close around him, Amos must confront a question more complicated than whether his new business will survive:

How much of yourself can you give away before ownership stops meaning anything?

Set in Newark and told through contracts, public records, family histories, financial calculations, and the people caught between policy and capital, FOURTEEN is a gripping literary suspense novel about legalization, race, money, redemption, and the dangerous distance between being given an opportunity and being given a fair chance.

For readers who enjoy intelligent financial thrillers, morally complex literary fiction, Black entrepreneurship stories, corporate power struggles, social justice fiction, and novels where nobody has to break the law for something to be deeply wrong.

The state gave Amos Gaither a license. The market sent him the bill. BUY IT NOW!!!