Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 1998, a year after the murder of the Notorious B.I.G.: Stephon "Steph" Davis, a talented teenage rapper, has been shot dead, and his best friends Quadir and Jarrell refuse to let his music die with him. Going through the tapes and notebooks he left behind, and enlisting Steph's younger sister Jasmine, they invent a new stage name for him — the Architect — and begin promoting his recordings as if he were alive, building a buzz that soon draws a record-label representative who insists on meeting the rising star in person. Keeping the secret requires ever more elaborate lies, while Jasmine, who has secrets of her own about her brother, quietly investigates how Steph actually died. The novel moves among the three teenagers as grief, ambition, loyalty, and the pressure of the deception test what they owe the dead and what they owe each other.
Author: Tiffany D. Jackson · Original publisher: Katherine Tegen Books (place not established), 2019
