Where the Dirt Starts. Empire Book

Where the Dirt Starts follows Mack Daniels, the eldest son of a respected Black Atlanta family whose business, home, and legacy begin to crack open when a violent message from the past forces long-buried secrets back into the light. What starts as a family meeting quickly turns into a nightmare of hidden rooms, missing children, old betrayals, and the sudden return of people everyone believed were dead. As Mack tries to hold his family together, he is dragged deeper into a web of street power, criminal history, and emotional damage that stretches back seventeen years.
At the center of the story is the Daniels family’s fight to survive what they have spent a lifetime hiding. Denise, the matriarch, carries the weight of old lies. Tiana searches for truth. Elijah’s return threatens everything. And Mack is forced to confront the fact that the empire he thought he was building stands on a foundation of secrets he never knew existed. By the end of Book 1, the family’s private war is no longer private, and the truth has become too dangerous to keep buried.
It ends with the family discovering that the past is not over — it is only beginning.