The Black Country /

It's been six years since Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins drove off a cliff in "Blonde Faith." But time is a flexible concept in the mysteries Walter Mosley writes about a black private eye who works irregular cases in his own neighborhood of Watts and throughout Los Angeles. So it's still 1967 when LITTLE GREEN (Doubleday, $25.95) Opens, and only two months since Easy's accident. Death being just another wobbly notion in this series, Mosley's clearly immortal sleuth emerges from his near-fatal coma and is soon off on a new case. At the urging of his best friend, the violence-prone Raymond (Mouse) Alexander, Easy agrees to search for Evander Noon, known as Little Green, a young black man who wandered up to the Sunset Strip "to see what all the hippies looked like" and went off with a white girl named Ruby. Mosley is never better than when he's got a juicy cut of history to chew on, and the hippie counter-culture of the late '60s perfectly feeds his style. His descriptions of the crash pad where Ruby took Evander during an acid trip are as vivid as any true-life memoir. The bloody laundry bag of cash the boy has somehow acquired proves a smart way to take the narrative into criminal territory, introducing unsavory characters who can shoulder the plot's antisocial behavioral burdens, like shooting people. Easy and Mouse originally burst into this series with guns blazing; but while they still talk the talk, they've mellowed since the old days, and Easy has completed his transformation from tough guy to knight errant. While the relative absence of violence doesn't diminish the novel, the surprisingly pallid language does. A lot of social barriers went down after the Watts riots, and things have changed in Easy's life. ("I was just a witness to the new world.") But the younger generation of liberated blacks, whites and have-it-your-way hippies contribute nothing to the local lingo. Better examples of Mosley's dynamic verbal style are still found in the exchanges between Easy and familiars like Mouse ("That woman hates the water I drink and the sun that shine on my back") and Jackson Blue (a smart man who is "forever thinking, and a thinking man is always in trouble") as well as Mama Jo ("There was no arguing metaphysics with her"), a witch who keeps a raven, a near-feral cat and a couple of armadillos in the cottage where she brews Easy a potent batch of "Gator's Blood" to get him in fighting shape. When you find yourself rooting for the killer in a grisly crime novel, you know you're in the hands of a real writer. Every character in Richard Lange's ANGEL BABY (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) feels like flesh and bone, even the ones who show up just to be killed. The story hangs on the entwined fortunes of Rolando, a Tijuana crime boss respectfully known as el Príncipe; his drug-addled wife, Luz; and Kevin Malone, an American drifter who drives illegals across the Mexican border. The plot explodes after Luz kicks her habit, cleans out her husband's safe, shoots her bodyguards and heads for the border "like a woman on fire." Even for a skilled smuggler like Malone, this is a treacherous journey because el Príncipe has put a ruthless killer, Jerónimo Cruz (street name: el Apache), on their trail. As vividly as the others are drawn, I'd throw them all under the bus for Jerónimo, the morally conflicted killer who becomes the beating heart of the story. "I woke, as it seemed, from a nightmare." Surely that gasp of fear and its sober reflection - "or was it simply my overwrought imagination running away with me?" - has escaped the lips of many a heroine in an 18th-century novel, something thrilling by Mrs. Radcliffe, perhaps. Actually, the line comes from THE ASYLUM (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), John Harwood's clever simulation of a sensation novel. The woman who awakens from a long sleep to find herself in a mental asylum in Cornwall knows herself to be Georgina Ferrars, an unmarried woman who lives with her uncle, a bookseller in the Bloomsbury section of London. But the head of the asylum swears she presented herself as Lucy Ashton (after the tragic heroine of Sir Walter Scott's feverish novel, "The Bride of Lammermoor"), and the uncle in London insists that his niece, Georgina, is at that moment under his roof. Working with a plot drawn from Wilkie Collins's "Woman in White," Harwood puts together a deliciously spooky pastiche of the high and low Gothic traditions and the tender heroines who live and die by them. THE BLACK COUNTRY (Putnam, $26.95) isn't as lurid as "The Yard," Alex Grecian's previous novel about Scotland Yard's original Murder Squad. But the overstuffed plot is still ripe with gory details, like the eyeball a little girl finds in a bird's nest and the leeches a doctor uses to treat those suffering from a mysterious plague. A missing family brings Inspector Walter Day to Blackhampton, a bleak coal town in the English Midlands that's steadily sinking into the tunnels and mine shafts beneath it. Grecian may not know how to hold a meandering plot together, but he has a flair for descriptive drama, so there are strong scenes of giant trees being wrenched from the ground, homes disappearing below the earth and superstitious villagers hiding from the monster that waits in the mines to snatch the unwary. "Our customs are important to us," says an innkeeper who seems to be an authority on Blackhampton's bizarre beliefs. Sometimes they're "what binds people together." Or what makes them craaaazy. Walter Mosley is never better than when he's got a juicy cut of history to chew on - this time the late '60s.

*Starred Review* In March 1890, Scotland Yard's Inspector Walter Day and Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith bring their Murder Squad expertise to the Midlands, where a husband, wife, and son have disappeared; the couple's three other children, left unscathed, tell conflicting stories about what happened. An eyeball, discovered by a neighbor child, is the only clue. From the beginning, the bleak stage is set: a coal-mining town in winter with its slag heaps and gray snow on glumly shadowed streets that are lined with buildings sinking slowly into deserted mine shafts below. The town's denizens, taciturn and superstitious, believe Blackhampton is cursed, as the disappearances are followed by an epidemic of violent illness. The suspense grows exponentially while the detectives unearth clues to a bizarre and complicated crime, hoping their forensic specialist, when he arrives, will shed light on the baffling plague and the eyeball's owner. In contrast to Day's first case (The Yard, 2012), this second in the series moves at a brisk pace, with surprising plot twists right up to the very end. Grecian's riveting novel is an intelligent historical thriller similar to Jean Zimmerman's atmospheric psychological novel The Orphanmaster (2012), and as shocking as David Morrell's Murder as a Fine Art (2013).--Baker, Jen Copyright 2010 Booklist

The small mining town of Blackhampton is a far cry from the bustling streets of Victorian London, but when three members of a prominent family go missing and a human eyeball is found in a bird's nest, Inspector Walter Day and Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith of Scotland Yard's murder squad are brought in to help the local police in their search for the missing family. When they arrive they find a town drenched in secrets, steeped in old superstitions, and haunted by the past and death. What happened to the family? Whose eye was in the nest? And what is the mysterious illness that is striking down the town's populace? These are only a few of the many questions that Day and Hammersmith must find answers to during their time in the Black Country. Toby Leonard Moore is in fine form as he expertly brings Grecian's historical mystery to life. With his even, pleasantly accented voice and calm, methodical pacing, Moore skillfully pulls listener sin and guides them through the twists and turns of this dark and captivating tale. At the same time he convincingly creates a wide range of diverse characterizations. A Putnam hardcover. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Grecian (The Yard) continues his Victorian-era detective series as he brings back Insp. Walter Day and Sgt. Nevil Hammersmith of the Scotland Yard. In this outing, they have two days to solve the disappearance of several family members in an isolated coal mining village. Accompanied by forensics pioneer Dr. Bernard Kingsley, the men are immersed in a baffling mystery in a community where secrets and superstitions abound. Australian actor Toby Leonard Moore does a good job bringing the characters' regional accents to life. Verdict This atmospheric novel is recommended for fans of historical mysteries.-Phillip Oliver, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Scotland Yard inspector Walter Day, first introduced in Grecian's The Yard (2012), returns to help solve a murder or two in the Black Country of the Midlands. The landscape is grimy, muddy and slag-strewn--in other words, a perfect climate for murder--but other mysterious goings-on also haunt the village of Blackhampton, especially a plaguelike illness affecting hundreds of townspeople. Day had originally been called in from London along with his assistant, Nevil Hammersmith, to investigate the disappearance of a couple, Sutton and Hester Price, and their young son, Oliver. The Prices leave three more children behind--Peter, Anna and Virginia--all of them precocious and creepy. It turns out one of the missing Prices and the community disease are related when Day discovers Oliver's body at the bottom of a well from which folks have been drawing their drinking water. Almost immediately after Day removes the body, Sutton returns, reclaiming the three remaining children. Throughout the elaboration of these mysteries, other puzzles emerge, like the appearance in Blackhampton of Campbell, a giant of a man whose cover is that he's a bird-watcher. We also meet, somewhat elliptically, a menacing figure called simply The American, whose face had been horribly mutilated by Campbell at Andersonville Prison in 1865; 25 years later, he's still seeking revenge. And Campbell, it turns out, had been enamored years earlier with Hester Price, so Sutton Price's sudden reappearance leads to fighting that emerges from jealousy. Grecian packs in almost more plot than a body can stand, but he presents with fine precision the gray and gritty atmosphere of late-Victorian England.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.