About this ebook
Once a radical organizer and now a respected Atlanta public figure, Benjamin has learned how to survive inside the institutions he once challenged. His nonprofit has influence. His name opens doors. His image appears beside developers, donors, and civic leaders promising a better future for the communities that made him.
Then a celebration ends in blood.
What begins with an attack at a downtown gala leads Benjamin into a network of manipulated rent records, surveillance data, relocation programs, and redevelopment deals designed to turn vulnerable residents into numbers on a vacancy report. Families who paid their rent are suddenly delinquent. Private information becomes leverage. And a neighborhood’s future depends on paperwork almost no one was ever supposed to see.
The deeper Benjamin investigates, the harder it becomes to separate the people exploiting the system from the people who genuinely believe they are saving the city—and the harder it becomes to deny his own role in helping that system earn the community’s trust.
With an attorney demanding evidence, a whistleblower risking everything, residents fighting to remain in their homes, and powerful interests racing toward a final certification deadline, Benjamin must decide what his reputation is actually worth when protecting it means abandoning the people who gave it to him.
Set against Atlanta’s accelerating transformation and a buried history stretching back through coastal Georgia, THE GOOD CITIZEN is a literary crime thriller about power, redevelopment, memory, institutional violence, and the dangerous distance between being considered a good citizen and doing what is right.
THE GOOD CITIZEN is the first novel in the WARDOGS series by Ken Oswald.
Discover more
About the author
About the Author
Ken Oswald is the pen name of Kenneth “__yak” Vann, Jr., an Atlanta-based author, visual artist, and chef. Raised in Dumfries, Virginia, and a graduate of Savannah State University, he brings a Black Southern perspective to stories about power, belonging, memory, and the distance between what institutions promise and what people endure.
His books include The Quantum Race Theory: How Systems Measure Difference and Manufacture Inequality, The Good Citizen, the opening novel in the Wardogs series, and The Earth Was Not Empty: A Grey People Odyssey. Across cultural criticism, political suspense, and speculative fiction, his writing pairs sharp humor with an interest in the people whose lives complicate the official record.
Vann’s creative practice began in graffiti and tattooing and extends through mixed-media painting and more than a decade in professional kitchens. Those experiences inform his attention to texture, rhythm, labor, and the stories carried in ordinary objects. Whether working on a canvas or a page, he returns to questions of inheritance: what we receive, what we are taught to accept, and what we choose to change.
Learn more at yakthestudio.com.
