WAKE UP, SAY A PRAYER AND HUSTLE

In the Bronx, everybody’s got a hustle.

Joaquin and his crew—the Stickup Kids—make theirs with masks, guns, and carefully planned robberies. They’re young, hungry, loyal to each other, and always chasing the score that might finally put them ahead.

Then Giovani Mercurio comes home after fifteen years in prison.

An old-school mobster with unfinished business and enemies who never forgot him, Giovani crosses paths with the Stickup Kids just as one bad decision leaves the crew buried under a mountain of debt. What begins as a desperate scramble for money quickly becomes something much bigger—and much more dangerous.

Robberies lead to drug deals. Drug deals lead to crooked cops. Loan sharks, mobsters, kidnappings, betrayals, and increasingly desperate schemes follow, until every hustle creates another problem and every enemy seems to be closing in at once.

Soon, getting rich is the least of their worries.

They just have to stay alive long enough to spend it.

Fast, violent, darkly funny, and unmistakably New York, THE STICKUP KIDS is a gritty crime story about friendship, loyalty, family, old grudges, and new mistakes—and the unwritten rules of surviving where they come from.