5 Books Set in Los Angeles that Inspired Sins as Scarlet

When I moved to Los Angeles two and a half years ago, it was with the (possibly naive) intention of capturing the city’s dusky underbelly for my next novel. In Sins As Scarlet, I wanted my Japanese-American detective, Inspector Iwata, to drift through the unvarnished tranches of L.A.—the industrial, the suburban, the impoverished—neighborhood kingdoms so…