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.**
Scatterboy Williams was a small-time hustler selling bogus Cartier watches in the dives of Pacific City, a port just south of Los Angeles, until a stranger guns him down in the street. Then drug dealer Ronny Aaron is shot leaving the liquor store. Next, college student Jimmy Henderson just barely survives his two bullet wounds. The three victims have nothing in common besides the neighborhood where they were shot and the color of their skin.
When the police let Scatterboy's murder fall through the cracks, his girlfriend hires private eye Ivan Monk to find the killer. What looks like three unrelated shootings of Black men in Southern California will put Monk on the trail of a racist conspiracy—and white supremacists hatching nefarious plans with the potential to upend life along the entire West Coast.
