Southland — Nina Revoyr

Nina Revoyr brings us a compelling story of race, love, murder, and history against the backdrop of Los Angeles.

-- Winner of a 2004 American Library Association Stonewall Honor Award in Literature

-- Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Award

-- Nominated for an Edgar Award

The plot line of Southland is the stuff of a James Ellroy or a Walter Mosley novel . . . But the climax fairly glows with the good-heartedness that Revoyr displays from the very first page. -- Los Angeles Times

Jackie Ishida's grandfather had a store in Watts where four boys were killed during the riots in 1965, a mystery she attempts to solve. -- New York Times Book Review, included in “Where Noir Lives in the City of Angels”

Nina Revoyr brings us a compelling story of race, love, murder, and history against the backdrop of Los Angeles. A young Japanese-American woman, Jackie Ishida, is in her last semester of law school when her grandfather, Frank Sakai, dies unexpectedly. While trying to fulfill a request from his will, Jackie discovers that four black teenagers were killed in the store he ran during the Watts Riots of 1965 -- and that the murders were never solved or reported. Along with James Lanier, a cousin of one of the victims, she tries to piece together the story of the boys' deaths. In the process, Jackie unearths the long-held secrets of her family's history -- and her own. Moving in and out of the past, from the shipping yards and internment camps of World War II; to the barley fields of the Crenshaw District in the 1930s; to the means streets of Watts in the 1960s; to the night spots and garment factories of the 1990s, Southland weaves a tale of Los Angeles in all of its faces and forms.