Hanging and Burning

A dying gangster's plea sends Joe King Oliver on a quest for a missing woman across America's coasts, unraveling a dark and violent family history along the way.

Joe King Oliver is the big man you call to solve the most delicate and dangerous of problems. Fresh off having solved the mystery of his own parents’ fates, King finds himself accepting (again at his grandmother’s request) a case from Arman Babylon, a powerful Los Angeles gangster now dying from cancer.
 
Babylon’s granddaughter, Twyla Mann, has been missing for years, and he’s desperate to find her before he passes. But the search pulls King into the Babylons’ stained past and the cold case of Dalia Shorts, a torch singer who vanished without a trace and whom Arman was once suspected of killing. But nothing is what it seems, not Arman, not the young woman King must find, and not Arman’s enemies who stand in the detective’s way.
 
As King follows a trail from L.A. to New York and back, he discovers a pattern of violence that has targeted the women around Babylon for decades—and he’ll have to decide how much he’s willing to risk so as to set a few things right.