Inner City Blues: A Charlotte Justice Novel (Charlotte Justice Novels) - Hardcover

Woods, Paula L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039304680X ISBN 13: 9780393046809

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999

Synopsis

This debut novel in a new series featuring black LAPD homicide detective Charlotte Justice will make mystery fans wanna holler ― with delight.

Meet Detective Charlotte Justice, a black woman in the very white, very male, and sometimes very racist Los Angeles Police Department. The time is 48 hours into the epochal L.A. riots and she and her fellow officers are exhausted. She saves the curfew-breaking black doctor Lance Mitchell from a potentially lethal beating from some white officers ― only to discover nearby the body of one-time radical Cinque Lewis, a thug who years before had murdered her husband and young daughter. Was it a random shooting or was Mitchell responsible? And what had brought Lewis back to a city he'd long since fled?

Charlotte's quest for the truth behind Cinque's death will set her at odds with the LAPD hierarchy, plunge her into the intricacies of everything from L.A.'s gang-banging politics to its black blue-bloods, and lead her into deep emotional waters with Mitchell's partner (and her old flame), Dr. Aubrey Scott.

In Charlotte Justice, Paula L. Woods has created a tough, tart, but also vulnerable heroine sure to draw comparisons to such classic figures as Easy Rawlins and Kinsey Milhone, but a true original as well.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

n-American woman in the predominantly white-male LAPD, homicide detective Charlotte Justice knows about heat. But now, thanks to twelve decent, pro-police jurors in Simi Valley, Los Angeles is a city rife with fires and riots. Forty-eight hours into the maelstrom, a prominent black doctor is mistaken for a car thief. Justice quickly defuses the violent confrontation, saving Dr. Lance Mitchell from a potentially savage beating by L.A.'s finest. But that's just the corner of a more ominous picture.

For the body of "Cinque" Lewis is found nearby with the good doctor's wallet beneath it. A one-time radical, Lewis murdered Justice's husband and baby girl in a hail of bullets thirteen years ago, then dropped out of sight. Navigating a terrain riddled with emotional land mines, defying the staunch LAPD hierarchy, Justice now sets out to uncover the shady truth connecting Mitchell and Lewis--but by reliving the tragic past, she may be forced to repeat it. . . .

From the Back Cover:

"Fast-paced, more twisted than a pretzel . . . The tale Woods spins around [Charlotte Justice] is as much about race and racism in L.A. as it is about crime."
--Los Angeles Times

"[WOODS] SETS SCENES THAT SNATCH YOU IN AND HOLD YOU. . . . Detective Justice can hold her own among such tough-broad law and order types as Kinsey Milhone, Kay Scarpetta, and Christy Love."
--The Dallas Morning News

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 039304680X
• ISBN 13: 9780393046809
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 316