IN 1992, LOS ANGELES BURNED Later as embers cooled, the body of a murdered Korean liquor store owner is unearthed during a ground-breaking ceremony at the infamous intersection of Florence and Normandie. Against a backdrop of increasing racial tensions, black private eye Ivan Monk searches for the killer. Then another body turns up. And while the FBI and the Rolling Daltons-the largest gang in the city-dog his trail, Monk questions whether there's more than simple murder happening. Questions that take him from the ghetto to the wealthy confines of the city's powerbrokers. Monk is propelled toward a conclusion that may foment another VIOLENT SPRING in the tarnished City of Angels.

Old Man Spears was a quiet, regular attendee at the Abyssinia Barber Shop, a man nobody paid much attention to until the day he dropped dead, while the other regulars—including Ivan Monk—sat around playin' the dozens and cracking jokes on one another. It turns out Spears played in the famed Negro Baseball Leagues along with Monk's cousin, Kennesaw Riles, who had been ostracized by the family for his questionable testimony, which put a political firebrand in a southern prison more than 25 years before. Then Riles dies, but not from natural causes. As Monk becomes immersed in finding out who murdered his cousin, his mother is brutally attacked, and the case turns personal. Events take him to the Mississippi Delta to solve these crimes. There Monk hunts for a killer and crosses paths with the remnants of the racist Southern Citizens League—while the wind wails Charlie Patton's "Killin' Blues," a mythical lost recording whose lyrics haunt the case. In his fourth Ivan Monk mystery, Gary Phillips again gives the reader a terse story filled with twists, turns, quixotic characters and the pounding tempo of Los Angeles, combined with the slower tempo of the South, where only the wicked know the answers in the deadly magnolia nights.