Excerpt from 51% by Matt Witten:
Chapter One:
4:32 am
Haylee and Juke
In her tiny one-bedroom speck on 20th Street, Haylee Navarro tossed and turned. Finally she got out of bed, threw cold water on her face, and made coffee and oatmeal to fortify herself. She’d been eating this exact same breakfast for weeks and was stupefyingly sick of it, but her income had been pathetic lately – her last murder paid less than twenty dollars! – and oatmeal was all she could afford.
Especially with her syndicate taking so much off the top.
She glugged down the coffee, pushed her short, no-nonsense brown hair off her forehead, and banged her fist on the kitchen table. “You are tough and you are ready,” she said out loud. She ripped open the kit she’d bought last night off the interdrone, taking out a Q-tip and a shiny green sheet of chemical paper.
All she had to do was swab the Q-tip inside her cheek, roll it on the paper, and within seconds she’d know. Either the paper would stay green, or it would turn holy-shit-I’m-pregnant red.
Or to be precise, she thought, holy-shit-I’m-pregnant-broke-and-single red. A picture of Harrison came into her mind, and she bit her lip to keep from crying. She raised the Q-tip toward her mouth, closed her eyes, opened wide—
—and her I! buzzed.
She thought about ignoring the call, but if that paper did turn red she’d need every dollar she could scrounge up. So she put down the Q-tip and doubletapped her phone. “Hello,” she said.
As she waited for the bot at the other end to tap in, she told herself: hey, cheer up. Maybe this will be the murder I’ve been waiting for.
That was the crazy thing about the crime marketing biz: you’d bumble along for weeks, even months, living on oatmeal – and then suddenly, boom! You catch a homicide that pays you fifty Reagans.
Two miles away, at his studio speck in Brooklyn, Juke O’Keefe didn’t hear his I! at first. His snoring and his hangover swallowed up the buzzing. But then it got louder, and at last he groaned awake.
He grabbed the phoneto shut it up and read the text: “Dead woman on Freedom, corner of Canal.” Great, he thought with a sigh. No shortage of bizness in this city.
He got out of bed – just a mattress on the floor – and headed for the kitchen. At thirty-three, Juke was tall with a bumpy nose and a two-day stubble. His deep-set gray eyes always seemed to be searching for something. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but sometimes when he smiled, his whole face seemed to crinkle up. When that happened, women would give him a longer look.
But most nights for the past three years, ever since his personal life fell apart, Juke came home from his homicide detective gig with the NYPD, Incorporated, or as everyone called it the NYPDinc, and wound down alone. After a day of confronting unspeakable evil – and even worse, office politics – he generally felt unfit for human consumption.
He often wondered what it had been like working homicide back in his father’s day, before the NYPD got privatized and bought up by a syndicate, before detectives had to raise money themselves to solve their murders. It must have been a hell of a lot easier.
Well scruck it, no use complaining. The pizza box on the kitchen table had a couple leftover crusts. Juke opened a creaky window to the icy pre-dawn air and lay the crusts on the fire escape. He whistled to the wounded pigeon with ragged wing feathers and just two toes on his right foot, who he had nicknamed Fuck Y’all, that lived on the roof across the street. The bird flew off the roof, dodged the holographic signs littering the sky, and landed on Juke’s fire escape, where he ate his breakfast.
Then Juke found a bottle of bourbon and poured himself a shot. This would be his last drink until after he solved the murder. It was the promise he made himself at the beginning of every case; and it was a promise he always kept.
Thirty minutes later a grimy gray dawn broke over the South Village. The pollution meters atop the light poles were on red, and many of the people hurrying through the cold to their early-morning gigs wore stylish, brightly colored masks.
Juke rode toward the crime scene on Houston Street, which had a special this morning: only two dollars per mile. He was in his beat-up old black Zan, the Department’s standard unmarked, driver-free car. It was a Sri Lankan piece of crap, and the self-driving digitals were always giving out.
As the Zan turned left on Freedom, Juke opened the NYPDinc feed on his phone and read the scant available details of the case: the victim’s body lay on the street. Apparent hit and run. She was found by a passing driver who called it in at 4:05 a.m.
Juke told his car to park several blocks from the crime scene. He always liked to walk to the scene instead of driving, so he could look around and get some context for what happened. Also, it gave him a little time to adjust to the fact he was about to see a dead body.
Home-brewed coffee in hand, he stepped past a vintage Starbucks that shimmered in the smog, flowing from green to purple and back again. Next door, a giant chirping holographic cricket advertised “Manhattan’s Best Bugburgers.”
Up ahead, a line of droopy yellow tape read: “CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS – NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT, INCORPORATED.” But Juke didn’t see any other cops at the scene. He couldn’t see the body either, because a bunch of civilians had gone over the tape and were crowding around it, screwing up the evidence.
Copyright 2026 by Matt Witten
51% by Matt Witten
In a future where corporations own everything—including people—one murder could ignite a revolution.
Twenty years from now, the United States is completely privatized. The Big Six syndicates own schools, roads, police departments…even human beings.
When a young immigrant woman—51% owned by the syndicates—is brutally murdered, NYPD, Inc. Detective Juke O’Keefe and his partner, Crime Marketing Consultant Haylee Navarro, catch the case. Pregnant and broke, Haylee knows they can’t crowdfund enough from a dead immigrant to pay for basic forensics, let alone their paychecks. But Juke, with his old-school sense of justice, is determined to find the killer.
Their search for the truth leads them to Juke’s ex, Safiya Jones, a Resistance leader on the syndicates’ most wanted list. As the three join forces, they stumble onto a conspiracy designed to destroy the last shreds of American freedom. To rescue fifty-one percenters—and everyone else—from syndicate control, they’ll have to defeat the most ruthless, powerful AI in the world.
51% is a gritty, fast-paced thriller about power, justice, and what happens when everything—even people—can be owned.
Thriller Political | Dystopian | Science Fiction Suspense/Thriller [ Level Best Books, On Sale: April 28, 2026, e-Book, / ]
Buy 51%: Kindle | Amazon CA | Amazon UK | Amazon DE | Amazon FR
About Matt Witten
Matt Witten is an American television writer for House, Law & Order, and other shows. He also has written several crime novels. The most recent are The Necklace and Killer Story, which came out in 2021 and 2023.
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