Before Leo Diallo ever took a case, Ashbury had already learned what it cost to build something worth protecting.

On New Year's Eve, 1954, photographer Henry Dawson asks five Black men a simple question: What are you going to do with 1955?

Their answers begin to take shape in Heritage Square, where Charles Saint James, Julian Sterling, Theodore “Teddy” Brooks, Harrison Vale, and E.J. Jenkins are helping turn neglected blocks into a community with a future. But the money behind that future carries secrets. An accountant finds numbers that do not add up. A singer hears more than she was meant to hear. A recording captures a conversation powerful men never expected anyone else to possess. And before the year is over, friendship, ambition, loyalty, and memory will all carry a price.

Told through the watchful eye of photographer Henry Dawson before passing into the hands of the man Ashbury will come to know as Pops, The Ashbury Five is a companion story to The Woman in the Green Cadillac and the Leo Diallo Mysteries — a 1955 Black historical noir about the people who built Ashbury before Leo inherited its secrets.