Fear of the Dark, The Aaron Gunner Mysteries
Winner of the Shamus Award: A failed private eye searches Los Angeles for a murderous white supremacist.
Aaron Gunner made a lousy private detective. After a year’s carnage in Vietnam and a quick exit from the police academy, private work was the only avenue he saw to be a hero. But the seediness, tedium, and lack of real power crushed his hopes, and he quit the job after inadvertently setting a pregnant woman up for a violent death. But after a savage racial murder, it may be time to come out of retirement. The white man comes to the Acey Deuce, a bar in South Central Los Angeles, to blow the head off a young black militant. The dead radical’s sister pays Gunner a visit with a .22 revolver, and convinces him to find her brother’s killer. As Gunner draws closer to answers, prejudice and rage threaten to tear Los Angeles apart. To save the city—and himself—Aaron Gunner must finally find his calling.
Gar Anthony Haywood
Gar Anthony Haywood (b. 1954) is the Shamus Award–winning author of the Aaron Gunner mysteries. Born in Los Angeles, he spent over a decade as a computer technician before first publishing fiction in the 1980s. Influenced by a love for the Los Angeles mysteries of Ross Macdonald, he wrote Fear of the Dark (1987), winning the Shamus Award for best first novel and introducing the tough-nosed Los Angeles detective Aaron Gunner. Haywood continued the Gunner series through the bestselling All the Lucky Ones Are Dead (2000), and in between Gunner novels produced the two-book Loudermilk pair of seriocomic mysteries. Haywood also wrote two stand-alone thrillers, Man Eater (2003) and Firecracker (2004), under the pseudonym Ray Shannon, finding critical acclaim for both. He has written for newspapers and television, including an adaptation of the Dennis Rodman autobiography, Bad as I Wanna Be. His most recent novels are Cemetery Road (2010) and Assume Nothing (2011).
Open Road Integrated Media
