Not Long for This World
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A lawyer hires Gunner to help her prove that her gangland client is not a killer
Darrel Lovejoy doesn't owe South Central anything. By all accounts, he is lucky to escape this desperate corner of Los Angeles, to go to college and graduate into a well-paid advertising job. But something compels him to return. He dives into social work, attempting to mediate between the gangs which have brought hell to the streets he grew up on, and he makes slow but steady progress up until the day a shotgun blast cuts him down.
After an unusually forthcoming witness swears she saw a car of Imperial Blues kill Lovejoy, the police arrest Blue soldier Toby Mills. Suspecting a frame-up, Toby's lawyer hires private detective Aaron Gunner to vet the woman's story. To find out why South Central's favorite son had to die, Gunner will turn gangland upside down.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
L.A. private eye Aaron Gunner has familiar qualities: he's youngish, not very successful (his ``office'' is behind a barber shop), eyed askance by cops but appreciatively by pretty women, medium-boiled with a strong ethical sense. The hook is he's black. When Darrel Lovejoy, head of a church-related Peace Patrol helping young gang members, is killed in a ``drive-by,'' a witness names two ``gang-bangers.'' The public defender of a jailed suspect asks Gunner to find the missing driver. Gunner is soon immersed in the squalid world of violence, drugs, readily available automatic weapons and the bone-deep despair of L.A. adolescent gangs. The eyewitness is a crackhead fed by a nasty drug dealer; the fugitive's older brother is not the upright citizen everyone thinks; a high-profile minister has his own secret; and some of the teenagers are frightening creatures. The title applies to them. The appealing Gunner was featured in Haywood's 1987 Fear of the Dark , which won Best First Private Eye Novel.
