barbara fister reviewed One-Shot Harry by Gary Phillips
Review of 'One-Shot Harry' on 'LibraryThing'
Los Angeles, 1963. Harry Ingram, a Korean War vet, makes his living as a photojournalist, always keeping an ear on the police scanner to find subjects for his camera. It's not easy for a Black man to make ends meet as a photographer, so he moonlights as a process server. When a jazz musician he knows dies in road accident, he captures some photos before the police run him off, and what he sees when he develops his film makes him suspicious that it wasn't an accident after all. But untangling everything won't come easy. returnreturnGary Phillips does a great job of evoking the time and place - L.A. just as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. is due in town to speak - adding to our catalog of Los Angeles crime fiction a memorable African American protagonist who knows his way around the mean streets.