Michael O'Shea is a member of Ireland's police force, known as The Guards. He's also a sociopath who walks a knife edge between sanity and all-out mayhem. When an exchange program is initiated and twenty Guards come to America and twenty cops from the States go to Ireland, Shay, as he's known, has his lifelong dream come true--he becomes a member of the NYPD. But Shay's dream is about to become New York's nightmare.

On a Brooklyn street corner, a police officer shoots and kills a young Black man, igniting a firestorm of protests and unrest, denials and excuses from cops, promises and apologies from politicians, and cries of hate and outrage from an aggrieved public. The police officer in question, Georgina Reed, is a rookie, fresh from the police academy, and she herself is young and Black. Caught in the middle of this conflagration of law, politics, and race...

When Zach, a white boy from Philly, moves to a racially divided town, he befriends Black siblings Capri and Justin, but when the police murder one of their friends, the town erupts into an all-out war, with Capri, Justin, and Zach caught in the middle.