ABOUT THE BOOK

Hired for next-to-nothing by an unwed teenage mother, L.A. PI Ivan Monk assumes little can be done to find the killers of petty thief Scatterboy Williams. But more young men are gunned down, and Monk, sherrif's deputies, and members of a community in need of hope are now looking for a serial killer with a bleached face. Events take the detective on the road to Perdition, a town in the Pacific Northwest. He encounters a crucible of skinhead activity, both supremacist and multi racial. Then a white's rights rally leads to a riot. Amid the chaos Monk uncovers larger political machinations which take him back to L.A. to confront manipulators willing to destroy any who stand in the way of their cause.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

'In the tradition of Hammett's Continental Op, Ivan Monk takes on a corrupt world. He's ready to go down fighting and he makes us feel that the war he's waging is for our own salvation.' - Walter Mosley

"Tough, smart and unabashedly political." - Gar Anthony Haywood

'Ivan Monk traverses the terrain of the boosters and mercenaries who run Blade Runnerville. He is an unbowed, post modern protagonist who, with brains and brawn, confronts this Hobbesian universe in his quest for the answers. Violent Spring peels away the studded rind of the golden orange, exposing its bete noire core.' - Mike Davis

'Gary Phillips is my kind of crime writer and Ivan Monk my kind of detective...an unbeatable combination' - Sara Paretsky