Must Be the Devil

by Kenny Lucas, Keith Lucas

Growing up in the Newark housing projects in the 1980s, Kenny and Keith Lucas are surrounded by drugs and violence - but also beauty and friendship.

They soon attend prestigious law schools (Duke and NYU), where they observe their white friends freely enjoying the drugs that land their Black friends in jail, and secure jobs at white-shoe law firms in Manhattan. Attempting to balance and code-switch between two worlds, gulping pills to tamp down inexplicable rage and depression, the center eventually does not hold.

They suffer a breakdown - and breakthrough - quitting it all to start afresh in Hollywood, only to find they have not quite run away from all their problems . . .

This powerful memoir illuminates urgent, contemporary themes of Black mental health and nihilism, compromise and integrity, breakdown and renewal, and the complications of two Black twin brothers' quest to preserve their sanity as they navigate a white world.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication July 16, 2026