Showing results by author "Joe Ide" in All Categories

East Long Beach. The LAPD is barely keeping up with the high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, OAPs are getting hoodwinked, children are missing. But word has spread: if you've got a case the police can't or won't touch, Isaiah Quintabe will help you out. They call him IQ. He's a loner and a high school dropout, his unassuming nature disguising a relentless determination and a fierce intelligence. He charges his clients whatever they can afford. But now he needs a client who can pay.

'In a way, the hate felt good. You were righteous, godlike, the dispenser of justice...' Super-smart sleuth Isaiah Quintabe - IQ to his friends - has built a mostly respectable life for himself, helping out friends and neighbours when he can and taking the occasional case to make ends meet. But there is one mystery that still haunts him almost 10 years later - did his brother really die in a hit-and-run, or was there more to the story behind his death?

Isaiah Quintabe - IQ for short - has never been more successful - or felt more alone. A series of high-profile wins in his hometown of East Long Beach have made him so notorious that he can hardly go to the corner store without being recognised. Dodson, once his sidekick, is now his full-fledged partner, hell-bent on giving IQ's PI business some real legitimacy: a Facebook page, and IQ's promise to stop accepting Christmas sweaters and carpet cleanings in exchange for PI services.

Isaiah Quintabe, the genius PI who combines book smarts, street smarts and enough blistering action to melt the pavement of East Long Beach, is back with a new adventure. Fresh off the beating he took at the hands of a gang of ex-Abu Ghraib thugs working as paramilitary contractors, IQ is determined to build a life for himself with his new girlfriend, Grace. For once, he wants to be normal - a normal guy, with a normal PI business, doing the best he can. But this is IQ, and trouble is never far behind him....

The seductive and relentless figure of Raymond Chandler's detective, Philip Marlowe, is vividly re-imagined in present-day Los Angeles. Here is a city of scheming Malibu actresses, ruthless gang members, virulent inequality and washed-out police. Acclaimed and award-winning novelist Joe Ide imagines a Marlowe very much of our time: he's a quiet, lonely and remarkably capable and confident private detective, though he lives beneath the shadow of his father, a once-decorated LAPD homicide detective, famous throughout the city, who's given in to drink after the death of Marlowe's mother.

As IQ plugs a mysterious USB into his laptop, he's horrified to see what flashes across the screen: his girlfriend Grace is sweaty and bedraggled - her wrists wrapped with duct tape. Grace has been kidnapped by the likes of Skip Hanson, a brutish hitman with a vendetta against Isaiah. As IQ and Dodson attempt to locate Grace based on scant evidence, (read: a Sonic burger wrapper in one grainy image) they must wend through the stark, unrelenting East California landscape in search of clues.

Isaiah Quintabe is no longer IQ, the genius of East Long Beach; instead, he’s a man on the road and on the run, hiding in a small Northern California town when his room is broken into by a desperate young man on the trail of the state’s most prolific serial killer.

I.Q. nennt man Isaiah Quintabe in den schwarzen Hoods von Los Angeles. Weil er ein Genie ist und weil er als eine Art Nachbarschaftsdetektiv ohne Lizenz den "kleinen Leuten" zu ihrem Recht verhilft. Oder wenn das schwierig ist, immerhin zu Gerechtigkeit, Genugtuung und Entschädigung. Zusammen mit seinem Sidekick, dem schlagfertigen Gangsta Dodson, wird er wider Willen von dem Top-Rapper Murda One angeheuert, um Mordanschläge auf dessen Leben aufzuklären.