From the red ochre of the Timbisha Shoshone's Death Valley to the embers of South-Central in the spring of 1992, a celebrated Austrian journalist moonlighting as a serial killer stalks the sex workers of Los Angeles while a high-end Hollywood madam builds a million-dollar empire on their backs. An OG Grape Street Crip drafts a truce between the gangs of Watts so that his newborn son might have a chance to live. A Korean man exonerated eight years ago and unceremoniously abandoned by the system is already burning from the inside out. And the judge who lets a child's killer walk free with a slap on the wrist walks out of the flames unscathed. As a city built on stolen land tears itself apart, the only verdict anyone can be sure of is the one waiting for the children who inherit its ashes.
