Conflict in Blue

The Marissa Ortega Story

The book, Conflict in Blue: The Marissa Ortega Story begins where D. E. Grays second book, True to the Blue left off. Marissa Ortega, the daughter of deceased police officer, Sergio Ortega, who was fired from the Los Angeles Police Department for a bogus charge of filing a false police report, a charge he was later cleared of, is now an L.A.P.D. officer herself. After witnessing the murder of her father by a ruthless Hispanic gangbanger when she was just nine years old, she now has a score to settle, not just with the notorious Avenues Street Gang who reins down terror on the citizens in LAs Northeast Division where she works, but with the LAPD itself. With her aggressive approach in dealing with the local street gangs, she soon finds herself, along with her partner, on a Mexican Mafia hit list after three Avenues Street Gang members die, one of them the little brother of an imprisoned Mafioso, at the conclusion of a violent police pursuit. Even though she is on a Mafia hit list, Marissa sets out to find the gang member who killed her uncle back before she was born and who is now out of prison and back on the streets with EMERO status and who is now considered a parolee at large. Things get worse when the hit on Marissa and her partner, by gang members, goes awry and one of her family members is murdered by accident as well as her partners wife. Marissa eventually teams up with a Bryce Stevens, a detective assigned to the Robbery Homicide Division of the LAPD. Together they devise a plan to trick Emilio Soto, aka Whitey, a bumbling Avenues gang member, into becoming a confidential informant hoping he will lead them to the individual who killed her uncle and to the gang members who killed her family member and her partners wife. It becomes a race between Marissa Ortega and Jorge Mendoza, the Avenues Street Gang leader, to see who will stay alive long enough before the other is brought to justice.