Detective Fiction, African Americans - Fiction & Literature, Multicultural Detectives - Fiction, Occupations - Fiction
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Overview
Sticking his nose into other people's business is what Los Angeles private investigator Aaron Gunner does best, but one of the few times he refused to do so a pretty lady ended up dead. Gunner turned Grace Mokes away because he didn't feel comfortable saving her from the one-sided boxing match that was her marriage to his old friend Jolly, and when Jolly killed her less than a week later, Gunner knew he had made a mistake. A mistake he was determined never to make again. Naturally then, when Gunner's old love Nina Pearson is found dead in the kitchen of her South-Central L.A. home, allegedly murdered by an abusive husband of her own, Gunner can't help making it his business to track her killer down. No one really wants his help - not the police, not Nina's friends, not even Nina's grieving mother, Mimi - but Gunner finds the dead woman's husband anyway, only to be convinced he's found, and seriously wounded, an innocent man. Nina Person's real murderer is still at large and Gunner alone can prove it.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Aaron Gunner, one of a growing number of notable fictional black sleuths including Easy Rawlins, Marti MacAlister and Blanche White, drives the meanest streets of South-Central L.A. in a bright red Cobra. The fourth Gunner mystery, and the first since 1993's You Can Die Trying, finds the PI trying to cope with the murder of a former girlfriend caught in an abusive relationship while he does a bit of skip-tracing for Best Way Electronics owner Roman Goody. Finding the skip suspect brings more trouble and pain than heor his clientbargained for. And searching for Nina Pearson's killer leads him to a sequence of victims' stories that are as ugly as the title promises. He finds these stories at Sisterhood House, a shelter where Nina stayed; at the law firm that fired her; at the studio of a photographer documenting the lives of abused women. Giving Gunner a searing anger at those who show disrespect for and mistreat others, Haywood surrounds his detective with a vibrant cast of minor characters, all of whom leave strong impressions. (Sept.)Kirkus Reviews
After a three-year vacation while Haywood introduced the zany Loudermilk family (Bad News Travels Fast, 1995, etc.), his main man, L.A. shamus Aaron Gunner, is back on the job. It's not much of a job, either: a routine skip-trace on deadbeat Russell Dartmouth, who stopped paying the installments on his Best Way Electronics tab after the down payment. Gunner, no slouch as a p.i., looks Dartmouth up in the phone book, goes over to his house, and takes him down, after a brief disagreement turned physical puts him in Dartmouth's bad books forever. It seems doubly unfair, since Gunner would rather be investigating the shotgunning of his old girlfriend Nina Pearson. But there's no client in the wings, and no help from the police, who are convinced the triggerman was Nina's abusive husband Michael. Gunner, who's not so sure, goes mano á mano with Michael anyway, and once the ambulance leaves the scene, the cops are ready to close the case. But Gunner is just beginning. Getting a line on the women's shelter where Nina had made friends who now look like suspects, he'll gather evidence against the lawyer who fired Nina from her job after she claimed harassment, two different women who threatened her with a gun, the new lover who was more enthusiastic about their fling than Nina was, and a photographer who shoots more than pictures—all before getting a brainwave that has him picking the killer virtually out of thin air, which is about how the killer picked Nina.Gunner (You Can Die Trying, 1993) knows everybody who's anybody, and even more people who aren't, and his tour of the battered-wives scene is the high point of this eventful but slackly told story.
Book Details
Published
March 1, 1997
Publisher
Thorndike Pr
Pages
357
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780786209675