<p> When Alex Powell stops into a Los Angeles bookstore on a rainy spring night, she's planning to write a column on the author who is reading and signing books there. But what she gets instead is a firsthand look at the murder of a controversial African American writer. James Simpson Lee Hastings's death sends seismic shock waves through Los Angeles's black and white elite, and reveals how some of the city's well-to-do are connected in ways they'd rather leave unmentioned. But trying to unravel those connections might mean that the next time Alex's name shows up in her paper, it won't be as a byline, but in her own obituary. </p>