Black Betty /

It's summertime 1961, and the livin' isn't so easy for Easy Rawlins. His real-estate deals--largely kept secret to avoid the reprisals that a black landlord in postwar Los Angeles might expect from both black friends and white enemies--have mostly gone bad, his wife has left, and he's attempting to raise two kids on his own. Easy needs money bad, so when a white private eye offers two grand to help find Betty Eady, a name from Easy's distant past, he takes the job. Meanwhile, the lethal killer Mouse, Easy's oldest friend, is out of jail and looking for the man who set him up. As in the three previous installments in Mosley's acclaimed series, the case at hand is never really the center of attention. While Mosley develops a plot and generates tension as well as anyone working in crime fiction, he has always had bigger fish to fry. As we've watched Easy try to make a life for himself and his loved ones in South Central L.A. from World War II onward, we've witnessed the rise and fall of hope in the black community. As the civil rights movement gains momentum and Martin Luther King, Jr., comes to prominence on the national scale, Easy feels something very different on the streets: "I realized that I'd always be surrounded by violence and insanity. I saw it everywhere. . . . It was even in me. That feeling of anger, wrapped tight under my skin, in my hands. And it was getting worse."Just as he did with the war and the McCarthy era, Mosley gives us a recognizable moment in American history viewed through the eyes of a single black man. This perspective, rare in crime fiction, vivifies not only the black experience but the larger event as well. Here we feel the hot winds that would eventually ignite the Watts riots, not as abstract issues in race relations, but as emotions in the hearts of individuals we have come to know and care about. In Easy's bitterness and in the bone-weary fatigue with which he greets each new act of senseless violence--whether the weapon is a white cop's fists or Mouse's Colt-.45--we feel the ineffable sadness that has come to envelop our urban landscape. ~--Bill Ott

Mosley's Easy Rawlins series continues when the down-and-out PI is hired to track down the notorious woman called Black Betty in early-1960s Los Angeles. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Mosley's distinctive black investigator, Easy Rawlins, has moved from Watts to West L.A. with his two adopted children, but trouble still follows him. Hired to locate a sultry female acquaintance from his early days in Houston, Easy searches for her gambler brother and questions her Beverly Hills employer, unwittingly provoking racist police harassment. Meanwhile, friend Raymond (``Mouse'') has been released from prison and vows revenge on the snitch who put him there. Mosley, as usual, describes a historically correct ethos in deft, literate prose. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/94.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

It's 1961, and Easy Rawlins has lost most of what he had five years ago in White Butterfly (1992). Not only has his wife walked out with his daughter, but his real estate investments have left him broke, and he's moved out of his own building to a rental in West LA, where shamus Saul Lynx comes to ask him to find aging mantrap Elizabeth Eady, aka Black Betty. Easy goes looking for Betty's gambling brother Marlon, but finds nothing more of him than a bloody molar and a fat check from imperious Sarah Clarice Cain, daughter of the late, rich, unlamented Albert Cain. Why is Sarah so desperate to find Betty, and how is her disappearance tied to the police investigation of Albert's death? While he's pondering these questions, Easy finds big problems on his own doorstep. His investment in Freedom's Plaza is jeopardized by a smooth supermarket king who doesn't care for African-American competition; and his homicidal friend Mouse, sprung from jail after five years for manslaughter, is determined to identify and kill the witness who sent him there. It's high time the Easy Rawlins saga was recognized for the remarkable achievement it is: a snapshot social history of the black experience in postwar LA. This latest installment, teeming with violence, bitterness, and compassion, is Mosley's finest work yet. (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club; author tour)