A Harvard-bound African-American high school student and basketball standout has to pack up his mother and younger brother and flee from Chicago to a small town in Iowa to escape the violence of an abusive step-father who is also a dirty cop ("Finding Forrester" meets "Sleeping With The Enemy"). 

SYNOPSIS:

Despite losing his father---one of Chicago's finest---in a drug bust gone sour nearly a year ago, Marcus Shaw, an African-American high school senior, is finally putting his life back together and is at the top of his game, both academically and on the basketball court. But then his mother, believing that Marcus and his younger brother need a father-figure in their lives, jumps into marriage with her dead husband's former partner and begins to discover that the man is not only extremely violent, he's also a corrupt cop.

With the domestic violence spiraling out of control and a compromised police department failing to protect them, Marcus packs up his mother and younger brother and they flee to a small town in Iowa to avoid being killed. But the Shaws trade one set of troubles for another when they find themselves in a small, conservative, and predominately white community with little affinity for minorities. And just when it seems like things couldn't get any worse, Marcus' younger brother Jason gets caught spending some of the $400,000 he found hidden in the crawlspace under their Chicago home before they left---money the step-father has been skimming from drug busts to finance his early retirement. And with the step-father mounting an all-out effort to track down his family and retrieve the money, an explosive climax is inevitable.

ACE OF SPADES