Money Rock: A Family's Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South

"An ambitious look at the cost of urban gentrification."
--Atlanta-Journal Constitution

"Kelley could have written a fine book about Charlotte's drug trade in the '80s and '90s, filled with shoot-outs and flashy jewelry. What she accomplishes with Money Rock, however, is far more laudable."
--Charlotte Magazine

"Pam Kelley knows a good story when she sees one--and Money Rock is a hell of a story. . . like a New South version of The Wire."
--Shelf Awareness

Meet Money Rock--young, charismatic, and Charlotte's flashiest coke dealer--in a riveting social history with echoes of Ghettoside and Random Family

Meet Money Rock. He's young. He's charismatic. He's generous, often to a fault. He's one of Charlotte's most successful cocaine dealers, and that's what first prompted veteran reporter Pam Kelley to craft this riveting social history--by turns action-packed, uplifting, and tragic--of a striving African American family, swept up and transformed by the 1980s cocaine epidemic.

The saga begins in 1963 when a budding civil rights activist named Carrie gives birth to Belton Lamont Platt, eventually known as Money Rock, in a newly integrated North Carolina hospital. Pam Kelley takes readers through a shootout that shocks the city, a botched FBI sting, and a trial with a judge known as Maximum Bob. When the story concludes more than a half century later, Belton has redeemed himself. But three of his sons have met violent deaths and his oldest, fresh from prison, struggles to make a new life in a world where the odds are stacked against him.

This gripping tale, populated with characters both big-hearted and flawed, shows how social forces and public policies--racism, segregation, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration--help shape individual destinies. Money Rock is a deeply American story, one that will leave readers reflecting on the near impossibility of making lasting change, in our lives and as a society, until we reckon with the sins of our past.

Author: Pam Kelley
Publisher: New Press
Published: 09/25/2018
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.90w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9781620973271

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/15/2018
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2018
Library Journal 09/01/2018 pg. 70
Shelf Awareness 09/28/2018

About the Author
A former reporter for the Charlotte Observer, Pam Kelley has won honors from the National Press Club and the Society for Features Journalism. She contributed to a subprime mortgage exposé that was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. She lives in Cornelius, North Carolina.