Ash Dark as Night

(Hardback)

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Description

In the follow-up to One-Shot Harry, fearless photographer and occasional private eye Harry Ingram takes on a missing persons case while at a professional crossroads after one of his photos puts him on the LAPD's radar. An atmospheric dive into a city on the brink brimming with remarkable historical detail, Ash Dark as Night is perfect for fans of Walter Mosley and James Ellroy. Los Angeles, 1965. Tempers have boiled over in the Watts neighborhood, sparked by the traffic stop of two Black motorists, the Frye brothers, by the Highway Patrol. Freelance crime photographer Harry Ingram is on the scene, capturing images of the cops as they unleash batons, dogs, and water hoses on the predominantly Black crowd. When he snaps proof of an unarmed man being shot down by the LAPD, he winds up in the hospital, beaten, his camera confiscated. Proof of the killing seems lost-until Ingram's girlfriend, Anita Claire, retrieves the film roll in a daring rescue, and the photo makes front-page news. A recuperating Ingram is approached by Betty Payton, a comrade of Anita's mother, who wants Ingram's help tracking down her friend Moses "Mose" Tolbert. Ingram follows the investigation down a rabbit hole of burglary rings, bank robberies, looted cash, and city-wide conspiracies-all while grappling with his newfound fame, which puts him in the sightlines of LAPD's intelligence division. Boiling over with wry humor, fascinating historical details, and intimate atmosphere, Ash Dark as Night is a nail-biting ride-along through midcentury Los Angeles with a crime fiction legend in the driver's seat.

Reviews

Praise for Gary Phillips

Phillips is a storyteller first . . . The wounds of 1963, and the foreshadowing of both better days and harsher ones, feel unnervingly fresh, and a reminder that progress, much as we wish otherwise, never adheres to a linear timeline.
The New York Times Book Review

Phillips takes readers deep into another world and time: its jokes, home furnishings, baloney-meatloaf-and-hot-dog-heavy meals; its hateful slurs, invisible racial boundaries and cautiously hopeful possibilities.
The Washington Post

Propulsive . . . One-Shot Harry crackles with authenticity, and its resilient hero seems resourceful and tough enough to propel any number of sequels.
The Wall Street Journal

For thirty years Phillips has been a must-read writer, and One-Shot Harry is probably his best evertense and suspenseful, of course, but also deep, resonant and intelligent. It's a story that needed to be told, and therefore a book that needs to be read.
Lee Child

In the tradition of Dashiell Hammett . . . Makes us feel that the war hes waging is for our own salvation.
Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins series

Gary Phillips is my kind of crime writer.
Sara Paretsky, New York Times bestselling author

Gary Phillips writes tough and gritty parables about life and death on the mean streets . . . his is a voice that should be heard and celebrated.
Michael Connelly, author of Void Moon and Angels Flight

Author Bio

Gary Phillips has published various novels, comics, novellas, and short stories and edited or co-edited several anthologies, including the Anthony-winning The Obama Inheritance. Violent Spring, his 1993 debut, was named in 2020 one of the essential crime novels of Los Angeles. He as also a story editor on Snowfall, an FX show about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central, where he grew up.