Nightcrawling is inspired by a true crime that took place in 2015. It disturbed a young Leila Mottley back then that the media focused more on what the case meant for the police department than on the teenager who had been sexually exploited by law-enforcement officials. “That really stuck with me. I wanted to tell the story of a teenage Black girl from her perspective. I wanted to give her validity and respect. And I wanted to touch on what it means to be targeted by the people who, you are told, are supposed to protect you.”
Set in East Oakland, Nightcrawling is the story of Kiara, a teenager on the cusp of adulthood. Kiara and her brother Marcus live on the margins, in a grimy place that is ironically named Regal-Hi. Kiara is forced to take care of Marcus, who is older but refuses to hold a steady job and prefers instead to dabble in music. She feels equally responsible for her drug-addict neighbour’s nine-year-old son, Trevor. Her father, a former member of the Black Panther movement, is dead and her mother stays in a rehab facility.
Desperate to pay rent, Kiara turns to sex work convincing herself that it is “just a body. Just sex”. She is abused by police officers and unwittingly finds herself in the middle of a major scandal. With an empathetic lens, graphic details, and sentences so lyrical that they are sometimes impenetrable, Mottley packs in several themes into this book: the class divide, exploitation, brutality, racism, sexuality, and corruption.
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