An aging but formidable strip club owner, Claudiu "Manco" Kapak, has been robbed by a masked gunman as he placed his cash receipts in a bank's night-deposit box. Enraged, he sends his half-dozen security men out to find a suspect who is spending lots of cash and is new enough to Los Angeles not to know he was robbing a gangster. Their search leads them to Joe Carver, an innocent but hardly defenseless newcomer who evades capture and sets out to make...

From award-winning author Walter Mosley comes the third work featuring hardened ex-con turned street philosopher Socrates Fortlow. Organizing other troubled individuals, Socrates starts the Thursday Night Thinkers' Meeting, in which members discuss "the world and what would be the right thing to do." "Highly recommended for popular fiction collections."-Library Journal

"With Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff among its characters, this sweeping and stylish love letter to the golden age of horror cinema tells the wonderful, tragic story of Maddy Ulm. It takes readers through her rise from the complicated shadows of Berlin's first experiments with expressionist cinema to the glamorous deserts of Hollywood. For Maddy has a secret. A secret that has given her incredible insight into the soul of horror. A secret that has a...

Molly Pink and her crochet group, the Tarzana Hookers, are thrilled when one of their own gets a shot at the spotlight-but Molly soon learns that life in the entertainment biz can be deadly . . . The crochet group's informal leader, actress CeeCee Collins, has a movie out, and she's scheduled to appear on a famous talk show. Molly and the girls are excited to tag along, but when one of the Hookers is ejected from the audience for her excited behavior,...

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski.

"West of Eden, a work of history both grand in scale and intimate in detail, tells the stories of five larger-than-life individuals and their families, each one representing different aspects of Los Angeles and the American dream. There is Edward Doheny, the Wisconsin-born oil tycoon whose corruption ruins the reputation of a United States president and leads to his own son's violent death. Jack Warner, the son of Jewish Polish immigrants, joins with...

"It's 1977, and Faun Novak is in love with rock 'n' roll. After her mother's death, Faun, a naive college dropout, grabs her Polaroid and hops a Greyhound to Los Angeles. In the City of Angels, she reconnects with her charismatic childhood friend Josie, now an up-and-coming model and muse. To make their reunion even sweeter, Josie is now dating Cal Holiday, the frontman of the superstar rock band Holiday Sun, and Faun is positively mesmerized. Except...

"Los Angeles, 1946: It's been two years since Aki Ito and her family were released from Manzanar detention center and resettled in Chicago with other Japanese Americans. Now the Itos have finally been allowed to return home to California--but nothing is as they left it. The entire Japanese American community is starting from scratch, with thousands of people living in dismal refugee camps while they struggle to find new houses and jobs in over-crowded...

Settled back in L.A., James Stark (aka Sandman Slim) must find a dead man, recover an ancient artifact, and outwit and outrun the angry old gods -- and natural-born killers -- on his tail.

Sixteen-year old Jessie, still grieving over her mother's death, must move from Chicago to "The Valley," with a new stepfamily but no new friends until an anonymous fellow student emails and offers to help her navigate the school's treacherous social waters.