Perdition, U.S.A.

Ivan Monk #2

by Gary Phillips

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.

Genres: Mystery

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

GARY PHILLIPS has been a community activist, labor organizer and delivered dog cages. He’s published various novels, comics, short stories and edited several anthologies including South Central Noir and the Anthony award-winning The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir. Violent Spring, first published in 1994 was named in 2020 one of the essential crime novels of Los Angeles. He was also a writer/co-producer on FX’s Snowfall (streaming on Hulu), about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central where he grew up. Recent novels include One-Shot Harry and Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem. He lives with his family in the wilds of Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve written it in other reviews and I know it can come off as pandering so forgive me but one of racism’s many sins is that the Ivan Monk series isn’t more widely available.

Yes it does have a certain niche following among those of us who peruse mysteries. But good God, I go to a mystery section at my local Barnes and Noble and there’s so…much…dreck (and Agatha Christie reprints which — to be clear — is not dreck but that estate really doesn’t need more money). So many mediocre rogue detective or alcoholic PI books. So many cutesy clever Benoit Blanc wannabe whodunnits. The vast majority of them written by white writers.

I’ve sung praises to Phillips’ work in other spaces but this might be his best yet, a firecracker of a novel that touches on the hot points of racism. And it was written in 1995, a time when people assured me the political climate was calmer than it is now (which…hmmm). Tracking the seemingly unconnected murder of three Black men to a white supremacist group that is making waves on the west coast, Phillips’ writing is clear and his Ivan Monk feels human in all the best ways. No Gary Sue PI moves, no brilliant deductions, just shoeleather detective work and navigating the dynamics of the situation as a Black man the best he can.

I wish I had read this after Charlottesville because the parallels here are eerie. Many believe that Trump built a monster but he merely gave it power. This book is a mystery wrapped in a parable. And I wish it was more widely available.

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a decent read.

[Paige · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looking forward to reading more by Phillips.