Contract City
Contract City
Contract City
Mark Falkin
The year is 2021 and the money is still green. The fully privatized city of Tulsa, OK, is home to Sara Paige Christie, a teenage girl with her heart set on a film career in L.A. and her camera trained on the graffiti-covered walls of the city’s outskirts. In pursuit of a documentary subject that might propel her from college hopeful to film school admittee at USC, Sara has focused her ambitions upon a singularly ubiquitous tag―WH2RR??From the facades of storefronts to the walls of public restrooms, the tag is appearing nearly everywhere. Its stark all-capital letters and demanding question marks have captured Sara’s imagination, even as the private security personnel of Free Force Tulsa (FFT) scramble to eliminate the marks with power washers, gray-overs, and full censorship, stripping even photographs of the tags from the locally accessible Internet.Sara has no doubt that there is meaning hidden in plain sight, and she sets off on a mission to find the person behind the mysterious tags while balancing an already full life: her final exams, her wild best friend, a physical fitness test that threatens her GPA, and a family that seems almost oblivious to what’s happening just down the street from their suburban home.With the exception, perhaps, of her father.A retired Marine turned FFT investigator, Sara’s dad has been on the trail of the graffiti artist for his own professional reasons. And if he knows what’s going on, he’s not telling Sara.And they're not the only ones on the hunt…Tensions are rising in town and beyond. Between the machinations of the city’s home-grown megachurch, Chosen Hill, and the movements of a growing camp of homeless citizens parked just beyond Tulsa’s comfort and security, life in Tulsa is about to become very interesting, and Sara just might be in the right place to catch it all on film…… but only if she survives.

Book Details

Genre: 

  • Fiction

Age Level: 

  • 12 and up

Contract City is a book about a seventeen year old girl named Sara Christie. She hopes to get into UCLA and thinks that making a good documentary will strengthen her application. Her documentary is about the mysterious tags, WH2RR??, that are popping up all over her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The film is going great, until one day, she is secretly filming her dad, who is an FFT agent (Free Force Tulsa). He is looking at one of the tags. As soon as her dad walks away, a group of other FFT agents spot her and start to chase her, but aren't able to catch her.

Profile Picture

Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2021.  It has been six years since the first African American president was assassinated, leaving the country erupting in a widespread turmoil of riots, disorder, and crime.  It has been five years since Tulsa became the first fully privatized city in the United States, a grand social experiment with big risks that has the power to change the world.  It has been months since the mysterious graffiti WH2RR started to appear on the brick walls on the outskirts of the city.

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