Peter Houlahan’s Reap the Whirlwind: Violence, Race, Justice, and the Story of Sagon Penn recounts a historic 1985 crime that would irrevocably change Southern California. At its swirling center is Sagon Penn, a 23-year-old Black Buddhist, martial artist and community mentor who had never been in any legal trouble until two white patrol cops, Donovan Jacobs and Tom Riggs, followed a pickup truck carrying seven young Black men, some of them teenagers, up a dirt road.

The setting is a growing San Diego in flux. A progressive new police chief hoped to calm the city’s simmering racial tensions and address the disproportionate number of cops killed in the line of duty. Both crises came to a head when Jacobs incorrectly fingered the young men in the truck to be gang members—including the driver, Penn. An argument escalated into a brutal physical altercation, during which the cops reportedly used racial slurs. Within three minutes, Penn grabbed Riggs’ service weapon and fatally shot him. Then Penn shot both Jacobs and a civilian who was riding along with him, and fled the scene in a squad car.

Reap the Whirlwind’s novelistic narrative style delivers emotional weight as Houlahan, a master storyteller, plots out the cataclysmic event and its aftermath. Houlahan covers all angles, from skewed news reporting on the shooting to the inner workings of the judicial system to the messy interpersonal drama that followed Penn, whose psyche suffered devastating consequences. Though Penn is undoubtedly the focus of the book, Houlahan offers textured characterizations of significant players, like Penn’s lawyer, Milton Silverman Jr.; defense investigator Bob McDaniel; and Sara Pina-Ruiz, the only credible witness. When the story develops into a full-fledged courtroom drama, Houlahan remains an impartial, careful observer and rarely offers his own opinion, which allows readers to form their own conclusions and develop a personal investment in the case and those closest to it.

A topical, piercing story about how perspectives on law enforcement and innocence shift depending on who you are, Reap the Whirlwind shows how police brutality and racial profiling impact Black victims far beyond the actual incident—even when they make it out alive.

It’s not a total mystery who killed Gauri Lankesh, a hard-charging local journalist and activist in the South Indian city of Bangalore who was assassinated in 2017.

Lankesh, the daughter of a famous Indian writer and publisher, was an aggressive critic of India’s right-wing religious groups, which have grown in power, prominence and violence under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling party.

While a few alternate theories are proffered about her death, I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India is not really a whodunit. Instead, it’s an obituary of a complicated woman and a portrait of a country’s descent into chaos, hatred and lawlessness. (Don’t worry: You still find out whodunit.)

The assassinated journalist’s life is both inspiring and perplexing, as her understated career in niche local tabloids blossoms into martyrdom and legend upon her death. Lankesh was fearless—some argued reckless—in her opposition to government corruption, creeping religious fervor and the subjugation of women and minority groups. She fought with her dear friends in the pages of her newspaper, and her antagonism of powerful forces had those same friends and family worrying for her safety. And for good reason. It’s a story of complex family relationships, both within the Lankesh family specifically and Indian civil society more generally.

As the story of Lankesh’s life and death unfolds, Rollo Romig, an American journalist with marital ties to Bangalore, sends the reader on several tangential journeys of varying levels of relevance: the story of Christian apostle “doubting” Thomas’ maybe-apocryphal mission to India, the history of the restaurant industry in India, a dazzling description of Bangalore’s astonishing book district. But the author’s reporting about the case has clearly been relentless; he traveled multiple times to the region and interviewed countless figures with connections to Lankesh, modern Indian politics and the case itself.

The complex ethnopolitics of the region and the country offer a disturbing but vivid backdrop for the murder. India’s retreat from pluralism and growing embrace of bigotry and oppression mean that Lankesh’s story is just one of untold many of murder, political violence and religious strife in a desperate country.