RED STICK KINGDOM: A NOVELETTE

By Joseph Bernardez

Some cities are built on money.
Baton Rouge was built on memory.
And memory is dangerous.

Nadine "Nia" Batiste has spent her life surviving poverty, violence, heartbreak, and abandonment beneath the shadow of Louisiana's industrial corridors. Raised by her grandmother Odessa Batiste-a feared community elder obsessed with names, histories, flood records, land transfers, and forgotten bloodlines-Nia believes she inherited struggle.
Instead, she inherited a war.

When Odessa is murdered during a violent campaign tied to corporate redevelopment and land acquisition, Nia uncovers a hidden archive capable of exposing decades of corruption buried beneath Baton Rouge's economic expansion.
Entire neighborhoods were erased.

Families displaced.
Communities flooded.
Histories rewritten.

And powerful men built fortunes from the silence that followed.

Now, private security forces, political operators, investors, and a terrifyingly intelligent financier named Silas Creed are hunting the final surviving pieces of evidence before the truth reaches the public.
Because the buried records do more than expose crimes.
They threaten the foundations of ownership itself.

Forced into hiding alongside Malik Varnado-her former lover and a man scarred by the violence of Baton Rouge's economic underworld-Nia enters a hidden network of underground archives, flood corridors, survival systems, erased Afro-Indigenous histories, and memory infrastructures older than modern institutions.
But as the city collapses beneath catastrophic flooding, political greed, and corporate extraction, Nia discovers the most dangerous truth of all:

Real wealth cannot be stolen.
Not when it lives inside people.
This is not simply a story about corruption.
It is a story about what survives after systems fail.

Perfect for readers who crave emotionally intelligent thrillers with depth, atmosphere, romance, political tension, and unforgettable characters, Red Stick Kingdom delivers a haunting exploration of memory, power, identity, love, and survival in modern America.

Some inherit money.
Some inherit power.
Nia Batiste inherited memory.

And entire empires are terrified of what she remembers.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H18FT3MW
• ISBN13: 9798196299674
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 262 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.7" x 5.5"