There’s something about reading a book that takes you to another place, even better if that other place is your favorite city.  So if you’re looking for books set in Los Angeles to add to your reading list, look no further.  From murder mysteries to romance novels, these books will take you on a literary journey through the City of Angels.  So grab a latte, sit back, and get ready for some serious Angeleno escapism.

Detective Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus return to Los Angeles when a kidnapping hits close to home.

A young woman arrives in Los Angeles determined to start over and discovers she doesn’t need to leave everything behind after all, from Abbi Waxman, USA Today bestselling author of The Bookish Life of Nina Hill. 

Mimi Lee is in over her head. There’s her new Los Angeles pet grooming shop to run, her matchmaking mother to thwart, her talking cat Marshmallow to tend to–oh, and the murder of a local breeder to solve…now if only Mimi hadn’t landed herself on top of the suspect list.

From author and filmmaker Sandi Tan, director of the acclaimed documentary Shirkers, comes a novel about a neighborhood of immigrants, seekers, lovers, and lurkers.

If You Lived Here You’d Be Famous by Now is an insider’s collection of funny and warmhearted stories about coming of age in the Los Angeles suburb famed for birthing the Kardashian-Jenners and the Bling Ring.

A Black immortal in 1930’s Los Angeles must recover the memory of her past in order to discover who she truly is in this extraordinarily affecting novel for readers of N. K. Jemisin and Octavia E. Butler.

In this haunting novel, the author of Wild Women and the Blues weaves together two stories as they unfold decades apart, as a woman on the run from an abusive husband joins her intrepid aunt as they head across the country from Chicago to Los Angeles, and confront a painful and shadowy past that has reverberated across generations.

A queer teen rebel escapes small-town Appalachia and becomes Los Angeles’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix in this searing and darkly funny memoir that upends our ideas about desire, class, and power.

In this literary thriller, a young man descends into the Los Angeles underworld to find his family’s killer–aided by a group of strangers with their own shadowy pasts.

Have you read any of these books?  Are any of them on your TBR?  What books set in Los Angeles would you add to this list?  Let’s talk about it in the comments below.