Streets on Fire

Jack Liffey - the rough-edged, brave, compassionate private detective who garners more enthusiastic reviews with each new case - once again searches the volatile ethnic communities buried in the urban sprawl of Los Angeles for another of the city's mysteriously lost.This time, Liffey is looking for Amilcar Davis, the adopted son of a prominent black 1960s civil rights campaigner.

Both Amilcar and his white girlfriend from Simi Valley have gone suspiciously missing from their small suburban college in the wake of an unsettling run-in with a motorcycle gang at a local jazz club.

The whole city is unsettled, in fact, as a new wave of racial unrest is brewing over the choke-hold death of Abdullah-Ibrahim - a black Muslim and the Dodgers' new ace spitball pitcher - at the hands of the LA police.In the course of his investigation, Liffey runs afoul of skinheads, white supremacists, the Christian Right, and black separatists.

He also confronts his own latent racism before the city's ethnic tensions erupt into full-fledged riot that a bloodied, unconscious Liffey - by the will of his teenage daughter and the ingenuity of a gifted elevn-year-old black girl with a wheelbarrow and a pair of roller skates - only barely escapes with his life.