Ivan Monk Mysteries

In the wake of the Rodney King riots, Ivan Monk investigates a cold murder Just a few months ago, the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues was an inferno. Enraged by the jury that freed Rodney King's brutalizers, people took to the streets of Los Angeles to vent their anger on the city. For three days they smashed, looted, and burned, until South Central L.A. looked like Sarajevo. Now the city is trying to rebuild, and private eye Ivan Monk has come to watch the groundbreaking ceremony for a shopping center meant to symbolize the neighborhood's healing. But death is not finished with South Central.   As the dignitaries' shovels sift through the soft California soil, the mayor's spade finds the corpse of a man named Bong Kim Suh, a murdered Korean shopkeeper. As he looks into the senseless killing, Monk finds that it wasn't racial anger that took Suh's life, but old-fashioned, colorblind greed.

Three men are shot a few blocks apart, and Ivan Monk looks for a connection Scatterboy Williams is a small-time hustler selling bogus Cartier watches in the dives of Pacific City, a port just south of Los Angeles. He has $250 in his pocket the night a stranger guns him down in the street. The next victim is Ronny Aaron, a crack pusher who's shot to death on his way out of the liquor store. The third is Jimmy Henderson, a college student whose fighting instincts keep him from succumbing to two bullet wounds. They 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 an ordinary squabble between thieves turns out to be a racist conspiracy with the potential to upend life all along the West Coast.

After a fatal firebombing, gangsters hire Ivan Monk to prove them innocent The Cruzado family wakes in the middle of the night, their lungs burning with smoke. Staggering out of bed, the father tries to rally his family to escape their house. When his daughter and mother don't make it onto the lawn, he goes back in for them, never to return. This small housing development bungalow was supposed to be a new start for the Cruzados. Instead it became a tomb.   The logical culprits are the Ra-Falcons, a street gang that holds sway over the Cruzados' neighborhood. Only gangsters could be twisted enough, the police think, to toss a Molotov cocktail into a little girl's bedroom. But when the gang's leader hires private eye Ivan Monk to prove the Ra-Falcons' innocence, Monk unearths a conspiracy far more sadistic than any violent gang.

Ivan Monk chases a mystery deep into America's shameful past Half a century ago, Old Man Spears was a hero of the ballpark. In an age when baseball was segregated, he played in the Negro Leagues, providing hope for a generation of oppressed African Americans. Decades after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line, Spears is an old man in a barbershop straining to hear the game on the radio. An offhanded comment about a former teammate, Kennesaw Riles, shocks private eye Ivan Monk, who has deeply buried memories of a ball-playing relative by that name. But before he can pick the old man's brain, Spears drops dead. A few days later, Kennesaw Riles follows suit.   To understand the pair of deaths, Monk digs into the history of his family and his country. He follows the mystery to Mississippi blues country, where he's forced to confront a brand of hatred that he thought had died with Jim Crow.