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The 1992 riots in Los Angeles, after the Rodney King trial, is the focus of the beginning of this debut novel. Detective Charlotte Justice, a bright black woman, traveling in a busload of exhausted fellow policemen who have been trying to restore some sort of order to a city gone mad, is trying to keep her mouth shut during the racist sexist rant by a fellow detective, Mike Cooper. A black man is seen trying to break into a fancy car. The white men on the bus pour out onto the street and try to arrest the man, who claims to be a physician. Justice recognizes him as the doctor who had treated her for a dislocated shoulder the year before and she, and her partner, Gena Cortez, try and pull him to safety. While she is trying to get to the center of the melee, she feels her arm jerked back and feels a sharp pain, but, despite her uniform, and the pain, she feels she must save the man from her colleagues and from the mob that is now attacking the uniformed police. Gena goes to look for transportation while Dr. Lance Mitchell and Char crouch in a doorway. Finally, a journalist and photographer who know Justice, take them to the ER so Charlotte can have her shoulder looked after. At the hospital, the sight of an injured baby brings a flashback to the time, 14 years earlier, when her husband and infant daughter were killed in a driveby shooting. The murderer has never been found. The supervising physician of the ER is a friend of her brother's, a man she had a crush on during high school. Despite the world coming apart at the seams outside, Aubrey Scott stood before me like he just stepped out of a GQ spread, all six feet fine of him.... Mitchell's wallet is found under the shoulder of a murder victim, Cinque Lewis, the man who had murdered Charlotte's family. She feels that Lance is not guilty of the murder but she has no proof and the higher-ups in the department want to let the whole thing drop, Char cannot and she continues to investigate despite harassment from members of her own department. Woods brings us into her world, the world of black Los Angeles, with its prejudices and phraseology and favorite places. When her parents were courting, the went to Dockweiler Beach, because they weren't allowed to go to the beaches patronized by the white people. She and her family went to the beach once for a picnic, before it was seized by the county to become part of LAX. The swampland they drove through, on their way home to the East Side, where the upper class black families, or "niggerati" lived, is now called Marina Del Rey. Charlotte is a disappointment to her family since she opted to become a cop. Her older brother, Perris, is an attorney. Her sisters are also overeducated women holding good jobs, Charlotte herself has a Master's degree in criminology. Her father is a chemist who developed cosmetics for women of color and amassed a fortune doing so. Her mother is a society woman and volunteer. It's hard to believe that INNER CITY BLUES is a first novel. Her second, STORMY WEATHER, takes us into the world of the separate black cinema, and is just as well written and fascinating.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, April 2003
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