American Heroin

December 1, 2018
Ruthless LA gang leader and elementary school mom Lola Vasquez is back, avenging old betrayals and dealing with new ones."Twenty-eight years old, no more than five-foot-three, ninety-eight pounds, some of that weight accounted for by her long, rope-thick black hair." In a follow-up to Love's debut thriller (Lola, 2017), her tiny but deadly protagonist is now a full-fledged drug lord, running the Crenshaw Six gang and its heroin business out of a couple of apartments in a courtyard complex. Her sideline is administering immediate and severe punishment to anyone who abuses a woman or mistreats a child--and it is one of these do-good-by-doing-bad operations that kicks off the gang war that is the focus of this novel. Lola is now raising a little girl whose dead mother pimped her out for drug money (Lola's spaced-out ex-junkie mom, still on the scene, did the same thing with Lola), and she has a new partner in the drug business, a white woman who's a Los Angeles prosecutor. Though Lola's tastes are generally modest--she drives a Honda Civic and invariably wears a white tank top and cargo pants--she has lots and lots of money, part of which she uses to send her daughter to a fancy private school where she is the only nonwhite student "aside from three Asians and a Nigerian family with lilting English accents." Lola is obsessed with race and racism, so she has trouble coming to terms with her attraction to the sandy-haired, board-shorts-wearing dad of one of Lucy's schoolmates. If she gives in, she'll be cheating on Manuel, one of her soldiers in the gang, with whom she maintains a strictly sex, strictly secret relationship. It is a complicated story with many twists, and Love spends a lot of time trying to help the reader remember key facts and keep everything straight in a way that gets a bit annoying.You can't help loving this coldblooded murderer.

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January 1, 2019
Lola Vasquez is back in a stunning sequel to the author's Edgar-nominated and Debut Dagger-winning Lola (2017), which drew inevitable comparisons to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But Lola is in no way derivative. She leaps off the pages as a unique character, fully locked and loaded, a ruthless L.A. gang leader and a drug queenpin with a vicious affection for her family and friends. As Lola continues her ascent into the hierarchy of the city's criminal underworld, she manages to antagonize a dangerous new cartel while attempting to help a domestic-abuse victim, and soon finds herself engaged in a deadly drug war that threatens to destroy everything she's worked so hard to build. She battles not only criminals, but also the class and race issues largely responsible for the city's plight. Many readers may find themselves developing a definite affection for a woman who is essentially a cold-blooded killer, but others may find this violent novel a difficult read. Either way, it exposes painful truths. Suggest to those who know Arturo P�rez-Reverte's similar The Queen of the South (2004).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2018

Lola, the eponymous force-behind-the-putative-gang-leader in Love's Edgar Award-nominated debut, now rules her own drug empire in South Central Los Angeles, which means a good life for her mother, her daughter, and herself. But a violent new cartel initiates all-out war, and there's another big threat: her brother.

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