Perdition, U.S.A.

Description

Black private eye Ivan Monk’s search for a connection between three Black men murdered in Los Angeles leads to the unraveling of a white supremacist conspiracy that spans the West Coast.

The mystery series that launched Gary Phillips’s career.

Robert “Scatterboy” Williams is a small-time hustler selling bogus Cartier watches in Pacific Shores, a port city south of Los Angeles. One day, he’s gunned down in the street, seemingly at random. Then drug dealer Ronny Aaron is shot and killed leaving a liquor store. Shortly thereafter, college student Jimmy Henderson is rendered comatose after two bullets to his body. The three victims have nothing in common save the neighborhood where they were shot—and the color of their skin.

The police categorize Scatterboy’s murder as business as usual. But his girlfriend convinces private eye Ivan Monk to find the killer. What looks like three unrelated shootings of Black men in Southern California will put Monk on a tortuous trail unraveling a larger nefarious plan: the rise of an extremist demagogue.Praise for Perdition, U.S.A.
 
“Monk is an asset to the series—flawed, human, angry but levelheaded, brainy and brawny.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Watch out, you fans of Walter Mosley’s black private eye Easy Rawlins; he now has a rival in the considerable bulk of Gary Phillips’s Ivan Monk. Monk traverses the same LA mean streets as Rawlins, although it’s a more modern, post-apocalyptic city, if no less crime-ridden . . . . Phillips, an activist himself for over twenty years on issues such as housing and police abuse, knows the scene he writes about, and the result is a realistic, punchy novel that is not afraid to develop serious themes as it entertains.”
—The Irish Times
 
“Gary Phillips is my kind of crime writer and Ivan Monk my kind of detective . . . an unbeatable combination.”
—Sara Paretsky

“Ivan Monk makes a magnificent return in Gary Phillips’s Perdition, U.S.A. Phillips creates a harrowing, deft portrayal of post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, capturing its people, its mood, and its language with a skill so keen that he verges on sleight-of-hand. You won’t be able to put the book down. You won’t dare.”
—Wendy Hornsby, Edgar Award winning author of the Maggie MacGowen series
 
“Phillips takes us on an end-of-the-century roller coaster ride along America’s dangerous urban streets and poisonous small towns.”
—Jervey Tervalon, author of Understand This
 
“Hard-boiled detective adventure with plenty of raw energy.”
—Publishers WeeklyGary Phillips has published novels, comics, novellas, short stories and edited or co-edited several anthologies, including the Anthony-winning The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir. Almost 30 years after its publication, his debut, Violent Spring, was named one of the essential crime novels of Los Angeles. He also was a story editor on Snowfall, an FX show about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central, where he grew up.US

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