L.A. ’56: A Devil in the City of Angels

Engel, a former New York Times and L.A. Times reporter (What Would Martin Say?), has expanded the concept of “the wrong man” in his blistering true crime book of a serial rapist’s reign of terror in the Jim Crow Los Angeles of the mid–late 1950s. In the author’s gritty account of a tormented Willie Roscoe Fields, a war-weary veteran once sentenced for attempted rape, he gives a snappy, hard-edged feel to this black man’s terrifying sexual rampage against women snatched from cars in the city’s lovers’ lanes. The insightful narrative puts the brutal, senseless incidents at the core of the book in context with snippets of historical events of racism, betrayal, and police corruption. When Todd Roark, a black LAPD cop, is pulled in for the rapes in retaliation for dating a white woman, only one officer believes in his innocence and sets a clever trap to snare the real criminal. In a crowded field of fine true crime authors, Engel makes sure that all of the dots are connected and justice has its say. (Apr.)