Only the Wicked

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.

Gary Phillips has been a union organizer; a community activist on various issues; a printer; written op-eds on politics and pop culture; been the executive director of a nonprofit advocacy organization; and the political director of an electoral campaign. He is currently co-producing a documentary on a local mayoral campaign. Phillips lives in the wilds of Los Angeles with his wife, Gilda, children Miles and Chelsea, and their semi-useless dog, Mitzy.