Angeltown is a 5-issue limited series

Limited series

A limited series is a comic book series with a set number of installments. A limited series differs from an ongoing series in that the number of issues is determined before production and it differs from a one shot in that it is composed of multiple issues....

 created in 2005 by writer Gary Phillips and artist Shawn Martinbrough, and published by Vertigo Comics, an imprint of DC Comics

DC Comics

DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...

. The story is told in the blaxploitation

Blaxploitation

Blaxploitation or blacksploitation is a film genre which emerged in the United States circa 1970. It is considered an ethnic sub-genre of the general category of exploitation films. Blaxploitation films were originally made specifically for an urban black audience, although the genre's audience...

 idiom, with nods to the detective stories of Chester Himes

Chester Himes

Chester Bomar Himes was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels...

 and Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley

Walter Ellis Mosley is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighborhood of Los...

.

Plot

Allison Dillon, the white wife of African-American basketball star Theophus Burnett, is discovered murdered in her home. After the acrimonious end of their marriage, Dillon had written a scabrous tell-all celebrity memoir, and Burnett is considered the primary suspect, but has disappeared. He is sought not only by the police but by private detective Nate Hollis. The more Hollis digs, the more dirt on Burnett he finds, including a sex tape featuring Burnett with Monica Orozco, Burnett's lawyer and an ex-lover of Hollis', and soft-core porn starlet and z-list actress "Toasty", the daughter of local crime lord Paul Teddy.

Hollis comes to believe that Burnett is innocent, but cannot prove it without information from Burnett himself. Hollis eventually locates Burnett in a beach house in Malibu, where Paul Teddy's gangsters make an attempt on his life, which he survives. With the aid of his grandfather, "Clutch", Hollis deduces the identity of the real killer.