Gary Phillips has earned a widespread reputation for breakneck-paced fiction that perfectly captures the hard edge of life on the streets. Bangers features Rafael “Saint” Santian, a key member of TRASH (Tactical Resources Against Street Hoodlums). There’s a war being fought on the mean streets of Los Angeles. The gangstas are bad, but the elite cops out to bring them down are even badder. And they aren’t afraid to bend the rules either-not if it means getting the job done.

Gary Phillips has been published in The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Examiner, and Rap Pages magazine. High Hand introduces the unforgettable, six-foot tall Chainey (nobody calls her Martha), a former showgirl who transports under-the-table money for Las Vegas casinos. When masked shooters rob Chainey of seven million bucks, she’s got three days to recover the money-or else.

Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem is the first in an exciting new retro, rollicking adventure series. This re-imagined pulp novel follows the Doc Savage-style adventures of the first American to reach the North Pole–Matthew Henson.

The tail end of the Roaring Twenties. Harlem.

Hired by controversial spiritual leader Daddy Paradise to retrieve his adult daughter who has been kidnapped, adventurer Matthew Henson does just that. Then he must safeguard the two until the firebrand can deliver a momentous speech at a mass rally. Henson must employ all his survival skills to fulfill his task–skills that kept him whole in forbidden jungles, across Asia, and in sub-zero ice storms when he first reached the North Pole. Henson’s charge brings him face-to-face with such illustrious characters as gangster Dutch Schultz, who’s looking to muscle out numbers racket boss Queenie St. Clair; and famed inventor Nikola Tesla, who is using his electrical acumen to surveil plutocrats. Henson’s pal Bessie Coleman, America’s first Black aviatrix, lends a hand as well.

With a death ray zeroing in on him, Henson races against the clock to save lives, and to keep a mysterious and powerful meteor fragment he brought back from the Arctic years ago out of the hands of monied evil-doers.

Race and civil rights in 1963 Los Angeles provide a powerful backdrop in Gary Phillips’s riveting historical crime novel about an African American forensic photographer seeking justice for his jazz musician friend.

Los Angeles, 1963: African American Korean War veteran Harry Ingram earns a living as a news photographer and occasional process server: chasing police radio calls and dodging baseball bats. With racial tensions running high on the eve of
Martin Luther King’s Freedom Rally, Ingram risks ending up one of the victims at every crime scene he photographs.

When Ingram hears a call over the police scanner to the scene of a deadly automobile accident, he recognizes the vehicle described as belonging to his good friend and old army buddy, the white jazz trumpeter Ben Kinslow, with whom
he’d only just reconnected. The LAPD declares the car crash an accident, but when Ingram develops his photos there are signs of foul play. Ingram feels compelled to play detective, even if it means putting his own life on the line.

Armed with his wits, his camera, and occasionally his Colt .45, Harry Ingram plunges headfirst into the seamier underbelly of LA society, tangling with racists, leftists, blackmailers, gangsters, zealots and lovers, all in the hope of finding something resembling justice for a friend.

Hard-bodied and street-wise former showgirl Martha Chainey, who first appeared in High Hand, gets caught in the neon madness of Las Vegas in this fresh mystery. Shots ring out during a heavyweight fight, and in the ensuing mayhem, someone steals five million bucks that used to belong to a casino owner. If Martha can track down the loot, there’s a cool quarter million in it for her troubles. “Old school hard-boiled fare for those who like a bit of substance with their headbanging.”-Booklist

Gary Phillips writes hard-hitting crime fiction that grabs listeners from start to finish. In The Warlord of Willow Ridge, O’Conner needs a place to hole up after an especially bloody job. Tooling his sputtering motorcycle into the suburban community of Willow Ridge, he expects to find a place of refuge. Instead, he tumbles headfirst into a world of desperate homeowners, gangs, and violence.

Inspired by recent true events, the all-original stories in Witnesses for the Dead are set in motion by the act of witnessing. The characters who populate these pages are not themselves the perpetrators of crimes, but find their lives indelibly
changed by what they see as they grapple with coming forward, taking action, or retreating into the shadows.

In “Envy” by Christopher Chambers, a sweet, shy wallflower looks on as something horrific happens in his neighborhood–revealing something horrific about himself.

Agatha Award-winner Richie Narvaez’s “The Gardener of Roses” sees a Puertorriquena college student on the run from the FBI for her accidental involvement in a “terrorist” plot. Anthony Award-winner Gary Phillips confronts police corruption in “Spiders and Fly.”
And the protagonist of “A Family Matter” by IPPY Award-winner Sarah M. Chen investigates the murder of a stranger, leading her to question the political structure of Taiwan entirely. Other stories feature a brothel, the film industry,
immigrant detention centers at the Mexico-US border, World War II-torn France, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The stories are incisive, unflinching, wry, dark, and, in some cases, terrifying. You’ll ask yourself: If I saw what they saw, what would I do?