Two hundred twenty-one inmates dead in seventy-two hours. The official story: gang violence. The truth: systematic witness elimination.

When Black Hollow seals its doors, 314 inmates with knowledge of Tennessee’s prison corruption are trapped inside.

The guards hand out blessed knives.

Governor Holt calls it a reckoning—a chance to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It isn’t a riot. It’s an execution.

Desmond Rios came to Black Hollow to finish the investigation that got his brother killed. Now the doors are locked, the killing has begun, and the evidence his brother died pursuing may be buried with everyone inside.

Evelyn “Mama E” Washington turned the prison library into neutral ground, where gang colors stay at the door and enemies learn one another’s names. When Black Hollow erupts, she turns that truce into resistance—hiding the hunted, recording the dead, and refusing to let 221 people disappear into a casualty report.

Dr. Elena Volkova helped justify the killing. Her research classified certain prisoners as beyond rehabilitation. Black Hollow was meant to prove her right.

Instead, she watches a diabetic Crip give away the insulin that could save his life. Gang enemies protect one another.

Black Hollow isn’t designed just to kill them. It’s designed to control the story of why they died.

As Desmond hunts the evidence his brother died pursuing, Mama E preserves the names of the dead, and Volkova confronts what her ideas made possible, all three discover the same truth:

Black Hollow was designed to make their deaths prove some people cannot be saved.

The people inside are proving something else.

Informed by correspondence with incarcerated writers, Names Like Prayers is a conspiracy thriller about people society calls disposable—and what happens as they become witnesses against those who condemned them.

Gene Scott

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