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An Easy Rawlins Mystery
by Walter Mosley
Book Reviewed by:Easy Rawlins returns to solve a mystery set amid the devastating Los Angeles riots of 1965.
Easy Rawlins returns to solve a mystery set amid the flames of the hottest summer L.A. has ever seen.
Just after devastating riots tear through Los Angeles in 1965 - when anger is high and fear still smolders everywhere - the police turn up at Easy Rawlins's doorstep. He expects the worst, as usual. But they've come to ask for his help.
A man was wrenched from his car by a mob at the riots' peak and escaped into a nearby apartment building. Soon afterward, a redheaded woman known as Little Scarlet was found dead in that building - and the fleeing man is the obvious suspect. But the man has vanished.
The police fear that their presence in certain neighborhoods could spark a new inferno, so they ask Easy Rawlins to see what he can discover. The vanished man is the key, but he is only the beginning. Easy enlists the help of his longtime friend Mouse to break through the shroud. And what Easy finds is a killer whose rage, like that which burned in the city for weeks, is intrinsically woven around deep-set passions -- feelings echoed within Easy himself.
This is Mosley's eighth book in the Easy Rawlins series, and the setting is Los Angeles during the Watts riots of 1965. Mosley combines a highly involving mystery with a no holds barred commentary about race relations in the white- run America of the 1960s - a period of time that is still so recent that I'm not sure it could even be classified it as 'historical fiction'. This is a very powerful read and believed by many critics to be Mosley's strongest in the series...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
If you liked Little Scarlet, try these:
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From trailblazing novelist Walter Mosley: a former NYPD cop once imprisoned for a crime he did not commit must solve two cases: that of a man wrongly condemned to die, and his own.
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San Francisco's Chinatown, 1940: Miranda Corbie, a private investigator, stumbles upon the fatally shot body of Eddie Takahashi. The Chamber of Commerce wants it covered up. The cops acquiesce. But Miranda wants justice - whatever it costs.
