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Decent debut set a couple of years after Rodney King in LA but too many characters and a bad guy that was too obvious made this a bit of a slow read.
”Pico Boulevard was a sort of Maginot line of the Mid-City area, a buffer of the better-offs against the deprived hoards. South of it, along this stretch, there were the homes and apartments of mostly black working class folks. The populace included quite a few young people, and, as fall-out from the Federal cutbacks in social spending during the 80s, several were members of the Rolling Daltons. Not that Monk laid the entire blame for gangsterism at the feet of men like Reagan and Bush. Still, h...
I've read several Gary Phillips books and either this or The Jook would be my favorite. Man, this is so good. A layered mystery examining the many corners of Black and Korean Los Angeles at a time immediately following the uprising over the assault on Rodney King and the death of Latasha Harlins, Monk is hired to solve a mystery where the two communities intersect. In addition to getting his man, he also has to navigate the tensions between two ethnic groups persecuted in their own ways by Los A...
“She laid her head in his lap. "It's all so depressing. Los Angeles' capitalists trying to desperately leverage this place as the center of Pacific Rim finance and kids going hungry and people sleeping in their cars. And where I had bricks thrown at my car because black people thought I was Korean.”― Gary Phillips, Violent SpringAnd just like that it’s Los Angeles 1992. Damn, Gary can write. Ivan Monk is classic. I don't understand how I haven't read this one. Glad I did finally.
Very cool. Crazy L.A. Noir, complete with hunchbacks, set in South Central the year after the Uprising. I plan to read everything else this guy has written. Any crime book that mentions both the Panthers and the IWW, twice each, and keeps its politics there without losing character and plot, is going to get me pumped.
VIOLENT SPRING - OkayPhillips, Gary - 2nd in Ivan Monk seriesSet in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating and the subsequent riots, a novel set in Los Angeles in which a private investigator examines the murder of a Korean shop owner. Many suspect a racial motive, but it soon becomes clear to the private investigator that greed is a more likely motive.it was okay, but that was about all. There were too many characters and it worked too hard at being politically correct.
