Gar Anthony Haywood writes two series: a jovial one about an elderly couple called the Loudermilks, and a much tougher group of books starring a Los Angeles private eye named Aaron Gunner. You might want to start (or continue) your Gunner relationship with this harrowing, heartbreaking story. It begins with Gunner's former lover apparently being killed by her abusive husband, and goes on to become a journey through a modern urban purgatory. Nobody writes about the broken dreams of today's LA with as much anger or compassion as Haywood, such as in his description of a wrecked pay phone "hanging from its shredded cord like the victim of a lynching, which, in a way, it was. Stripped of both its receiver and transmitter, it was only a plastic shell now, just one more slice of inoperative blight for the people of South-Central to get used to." -- From Amazon.com Amazon.com Review