Year of the Rat — Marshall Thornton

Long Beach, California 1996. Despite having little obvious experience, bartender Dom Reilly is hired as an investigator for the Freedom Agenda, a not-for-profit justice project. His first case involves a twelve-year-old homicide, in which a teenage girl was viciously murdered. The boy in prison for her murder, Danny Osborne, is seemingly exonerated by DNA evidence but the authorities refuse to accept it as proof. Dom and his boss, Lydia Gonzales, slowly put together an iron-clad case, one the district attorney can't ignore. As they do so, each puts themselves at risk-threatening not only their personal reputations, but their lives.Runner-up Rainbow Awards