Only the Wicked

Private investigator Ivan Monk takes on his most personal case yet, pursuing a mystery that leads him deep into America’s troubled past.

Marshall Spears was once a star in the Negro Leagues, playing baseball during an era when both the sport and the nation remained segregated. Decades later, the aging former athlete spends his days as a beloved fixture in a South Central Los Angeles barbershop.

One afternoon, Ivan Monk, a regular customer, learns that Spears once played alongside Kennesaw Riles. Family stories have long identified Riles as Monk’s cousin, a man ostracized for testimony he gave during a controversial 1960s murder trial that helped send a prominent civil rights leader to prison. Before Spears can reveal more, he suddenly dies while listening to a baseball game on the radio.

The mystery deepens when the long-missing Riles appears at Spears’s funeral and then dies shortly afterward. Convinced the timing is no coincidence, Monk begins investigating the connection between the two deaths.

His search leads him from Los Angeles to the Mississippi Delta, where he uncovers long-buried secrets surrounding the murders of two civil rights activists. As he pieces together the truth, Monk finds himself confronting a group of influential Mississippi businessmen turned philanthropists whose past actions may be far darker than their public reputations suggest.

Far from home, Monk must navigate dangerous secrets, confront his own family history, and face a strain of hatred many believed had disappeared with the Jim Crow era.