The Patrolman (Detective Lacey, #1)

Los Angeles, 1941. Theft, murder, extortion, Communism – a day in the life of Officer Jake Lacey, LAPD. He's young and honest, still learning the ropes and hasn't quite figured out what it means to be a cop. Then the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service bombs Pearl Harbor and America goes haywire. Fear and racial prejudice consumes L.A. – cue the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans on the Pacific Coast.

Following the armed robbery at The Hollywood Bank & Financial Trust, fortunes are made and lives are ruined in the City of Angels: a last attempt at love cut down by the power of a bottle, a mother turning her back on her family in the pursuit of manifest destiny, a contract killer navigating political subterfuge before it catches up to kill him.

In Stapleton’s first novel featuring Lacey, the LAPD officer is taken from Western Morocco to the Halls of Justice as he traces the true identity of The Zoot Suit Strangler.

Though this novel is a fiction, certain elements of the plot have been lifted from real life events and implemented within the historical time frame of 1941-1943.  Some of these events and happenings are not for the faint hearted - please, in all earnest, consider this a trigger warning.