2nd Edition Now Released with New Cover

“A fantastic follow up to the first ‘Street Stories’ book.”

“True to Borys style you get a very surreal feeling of what life on the streets is really like.”

“Delves right into the dark and often twisted underbelly of inner city life”

Read all the reviews.

Snow Ramirez hasn’t trusted anyone in a very long time, not even herself. Memories of her childhood on Washington’s Yakama Reservation haunt her even on the streets of Chicago. When her squat mate Blitz slits his own throat in front of her, she knows it’s time to convince someone to trust her instincts. Blitz may have been diagnosed bi-polar, like Snow herself, but no way would he have offed himself like that if the shrink he’d been seeing hadn’t bent his mind completely out of shape.

Normally she wouldn’t care. Who wasn’t crazy in one way or another in this messed up world? After all, she’d gotten out from under the doctor’s thumb weeks ago and it was too late for Blitz now, wasn’t it? Snow’s little brother Alley, though, there might still be time to save him. If only she can get reporter Jo Sullivan to believe her story before Snow loses her own mind.

Available in Trade Paperback or E-book

Meet Snow Ramirez

Painted Black’s protagonist, Jo Sullivan, has been a busy little reporter since she filed her completed story on Chris and Lexie.

Photo by Judge Randhawa

Meet Snow Ramirez, the bi-polar street kid about to turn 18. She’s convinced that psychiatrist Mordechai Levinson is responsible for one kid’s suicide, and may be targeting her brother Alley as his next victim. Once again, Jo finds herself the only person willing to listen to one of Chicago’s throwaway youth.

A stray dog looked up from a pile of trash when Snow passed, ready to run if he had to. She crossed California to the alley behind a half demolished building. A dumpster sat, half filled with rubble from the destruction, and there was a spot between it and the wall where the ground was still dry. Snow pushed her way in, butt first, using her backpack as a cushion. Wind kicked up the light snow around the building.

Squatting with her arms tight around her legs and forehead pressed to her knees, Snow rocked on the balls of her feet. To the south, the hum of traffic along the Eisenhower Expressway. Nearer, beneath the dumpster, the scurry of rats looking for supper. That feeling in her center, the one she couldn’t describe except to say when she was a kid she thought it meant she was going to die, tightened her chest, filled her mouth, made it hard to breathe.

“You must learn to trust,” the shrink had told her. “You must learn who to trust. Your brother is learning that, even if you can’t.”