Detroit: Ashes of Light

In Detroit, the Motor City, caught between bankruptcy and being reborn, Max “No Plan” Whitaker drives his patrol car through streets where Rust Belt ruins and scattered glimmers of hope coexist.

A mixed-race patrol officer, he embodies two very different heritages: his father, an old-school, hard-nosed police chief, gave him grit, a sense of duty, and an intimate knowledge of the city; his mother, a top financial planner, gave him a cool head, analytical skills, and an instinct that seems to calculate risk. It makes him both familiar and out of place in Detroit’s East Side.

“No Plan” doesn’t mean reckless. It’s a nickname he earned for his extraordinary reflexes and almost instinctive ability to act when crises erupt on the street. But when an apparently ordinary domestic disturbance call suddenly escalates into a deadly standoff involving heavy weapons, Max finds himself forced to face the city’s deepest violence and despair.

This is more than a test of his instincts as a cop. It’s a challenge to his sense of identity: torn between loyalty to the Blue Wall his father represents, the different life his mother hopes he’ll choose, and the brutal, complicated truth of the streets, what should he do?

Also known as The Days I Spent as a Patrol Officer in America