City of Angels Trilogy - Leon Ward M.

John Marlboro, private eye, handles the hard cases that the cops are either too lazy or don't care about. He's an old-school gumshoe who believes it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Marlboro knows that things don't always work out, the good guys don't always win, and the Mounties don't always get their man. In Marlboro's world, life is full of ups and downs, strikes, and gutters. In the City of Angels Trilogy is a mélange of Love ' Hate. Good ' Evil. Betrayal ' Murder.

In Herr Doktor, Aribert Heim, a war criminal known as the Butcher of Mauthausen, is walking the streets of Los Angeles when a Holocaust survivor spots him. She goes to the police, who seem too caught up in the overload of rapes, burglaries, and murders to spend their time looking for a Nazi on the word of an old Jewish woman. Marlboro delves into the L.A. neo-Nazi party, Amerika First. They thought that they were on top of the world. They didn't count on John Marlboro to spoil their party.  

In Only the Good Dir Young, Marlboro is called upon to help the parents of a young starlet, who was found beaten, raped, shot, and dumped on the Los Angeles River culvert. When it's revealed the studio president of Miracle Pictures, a major Hollywood studio, local politicians, and the infamous gangster Bugsy Siegel's mob are involved, the police seem to be digging their heels in. In solving the case, Marlboro stirs up a hornet's nest of mobsters, politicians, crooked cops, and Hollywood bigwigs.

In the Red Queen, Barbra Babcock's brother is kidnapped, and the LAPD won't give her the time of day because she is the leader of the Los Angeles Communist Party. They couldn't give a spit that this commie's brother had been abducted; they were almost glad. Told that they had better things to do than waste their time looking for some "Pinko Commie Bastard." Marlboro doesn't care if you're a Red or Red, White, and Blue as long as you got the green.