Watch out, you fans of Walter Mosley's black private eye Easy Rawlins; he now has a rival in the considerable bulk of Gary Phillips's Ivan Monk. Monk traverses the same LA mean streets as Rawlins, although it's a more modern, post-apocalyptic city, if no less crime-ridden. A serial killer is knocking off small-time criminals, shooting them in broad daylight. One of those slaughtered is Scatterboy Williams, and his teenaged, pregnant girlfriend hires Monk to find his killer. The trail leads him to Perdition, a town in the Pacific Northwest, where he comes up against a White Supremacist Movement, then back again to LA to uncover a larger political conspiracy on the grand scale. Phillips, an activist himself for over twenty years on issues such as housing and police abuse, knows the scene he writes about, and the result is a realistic, punchy novel that is not afraid to develop serious themes as it entertains.