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by Darryl Wayne Jr. Townsend (Author)
Xavier Kelley lands at Hartsfield-Jackson with one bag and no plan. Expelled from Morehouse for a fight he can't explain and a rage he can't contain, he's been exiled to his father's Buckhead estate - a $4.2 million monument to a man who's never home.
His father is Chief Xander Kelley, the most powerful law enforcement officer in Atlanta. Third-generation. Politically connected. Running the city's police department like a machine - one built on loyalty, silence, and relationships that blur the line between governance and corruption.
His father's wife is Simone. Twenty-eight. From New Orleans. Smarter than anyone in the house gives her credit for, carrying a business plan in a locked room and a marriage she's been performing for two years. She's not what Xavier expected.
What begins as proximity becomes something more dangerous: late-night conversations, shared secrets, a connection that neither of them can afford and neither of them can stop. When Xavier discovers evidence of his father's corruption hidden in a desk drawer, he's forced into a choice that will define who he becomes - whistleblower or weapon, his mother's son or his father's heir.
Glass Empire is a novel about power, performance, and the cost of control. It asks the question every family built on silence eventually faces: who owns the house when the house is all that's left?
A literary thriller told in rotating perspectives, Glass Empire explores institutional corruption, domestic betrayal, and the architecture of Black power in modern Atlanta. For readers of Tayari Jones, Nathan Harris, and Brit Bennett.
