A review by pilesandpiles
Inner City Blues by Paula L. Woods

3.0

This book doesn't work that well as a mystery -- the resolution comes out of nowhere -- but I really enjoyed it as an LA novel. Writing in the late '90s, Paula Woods homes in on LA's Black upper middle class around the time of the Rodney King uprisings, setting the plot around Baldwin Hills and other neighborhoods of westside South Central. Woods is especially interested in the role of a Black cop within a community that doesn't think justice comes from cops, as well as how policing as a profession is seen in Black upper-middle-class culture. I think she falls short of any astute insights that feel relevant today, but maybe she picks up that thread to greater results in the subsequent Detective Charlotte Justice books.

Charlotte Justice is a forebear to Rachel Howzell Hall's Detective Elouise Norton. If you enjoy this book, I recommend hers.