City of Strangers — John Shannon

In the sixth novel of this best-selling private-eye series, Jack Liffey probes the complex ethnic mix-Muslim, Jewish, Baha'i, Christian, and secular-of the Persian communities in Los Angeles. A gripping tale that confronts youthful idealism with perfervid fundamentalism, it lands bright, earnest Fariborz Bayat, who has gone missing from an elite L.A. high school with three other Persian-American boys, in a cell of Arab terrorists. Hired to find the boys, Liffey finds himself in a nightmare, unless he and Fariborz can thwart the cell's plot to set off a dirty bomb full of radioactive waste high over L.A.