Little Scarlet - Softcover

Mosley, Walter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446198242 ISBN 13: 9780446198240

Publisher: Grand Central Pub, 2008

Synopsis

Walter Mosley delivers at last the compelling master work everyone's been waiting for--a novel so intriguing, so soulful, so unstoppably dramatic that it will rank among the classic mysteries of our time.
At the height of the riots that cripple LA in the summer of 1965, a white man is pulled from his car by a mob and escapes into a nearby apartment building. Soon afterward, a red-headed woman known as Little Scarlet is found dead in that apartment building--and the fleeing man is the obvious suspect. The police ask Easy Rawlins to investigate. What he finds is a killer whose rage, like that which burned the city for weeks, is intrinsically woven around race and passion. Rawlins's hunt for the killer will reveal a new city emerging from the ashes--and a new life for Easy and his friends.
Mosley's lean and muscular vernacular captures the heat and the rhythm of Los Angeles' heart, where danger is the common currency of everyday life.

About this title

Review

Little Scarlet takes Walter Mosley's bitter African American investigator Easy Rawlins into the era of the Watts riots--these novels are fine stand-alone novels of investigation and jeopardy that also function as an informal history of America's post-war racial history. Easy finds himself working for the Man, for a change, though with his own agenda--rumour has it that the riots started because of the murder of a local woman by her white lover, and the Los Angeles police want a lid on the case. Easy, predisposed to look for guilty white men, finds himself having to tell people things that they do not want to hear, and in the process uncovering police failures going back years. Like all of Mosley's books, this is an angry indictment, but also a novel filled with moments of casual kindness and regret - the Easy Rawlins of the later novels is less of an avenging angel, more a man made more gentle by fatherhood. Like all of Mosley's thrillers, this is more or less an instant classic. ---Roz Kaveney

Review

It's a suitably explosive piece of writing - to the background of the Vietnam war, Mosley manages to capture brilliantly a moment of change set above a powder keg. The darkness of the case and its setting may evoke James Ellroy's 'The Black Dahlia', while the relationship between the two investigators almost resembles the marriage of convenience of the two policeman in that same author's 'LA Confidential. (Omer Ali TIME OUT (16-23 February))

Walter Mosley's excellent new Easy Rawlins novel is set in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, in which more than 30 people died. (John Dugdale SUNDAY TIMES (20/2/05))

Little Scarlet is the ninth of Easy's adventures, and admirers of Walter Mosley's spare prose and understated observation will be pleased to hear that it is among the sharpest and richest. (Duncan Campbell GUARDIAN (19/2/05))

Crime fiction plus, which - as always with Mosley - excels and masterfully extends the genre. (LITERARY REVIEW (March 2005))

Mosley's wry streetwise humour is what keeps the fans coming back for more. (Carla McKay DAILY MAIL (4.3.05))

The absorbing mystery, as in all Mosley's Easy Rawlins books, is accompanied by a perceptive, sometimes shocking, portrayal of the surrounding society and the racial politics of the troubled city...He's back in terrific form. (Marcel Berlins TIMES (12.3.05))

The master of the private eye novel is back with a cracker...The story pulses to the hearbeat of LA, and Mosley's prose is tough and uncompromising. (PETERBOROUGH EVENING TELEGRAPH (26.2.05))

This is the ninth in a series of brilliant crime novels...Only Easy can enter the LA ghettos that are so vividly captured in this brilliant evocation of a little-known side of America, and Mosley's novel sequence is as vital as anything written in the US in recent years. (Philip Hamer CITY LIFE (Manchester Evening News))

Mosley and Rawlins both on top form. (Mike Ripley BIRMINGHAM POST)

This is Walter Mosley at his very best, delivering a raw, gritty and direct thriller in which the seething violence and anger of the time leap off the page while Rawlin's internal musings on politics, race and sex provide a fascinating counterpoint. (Myles McWeeney IRISH INDEPENDENT)

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Pub
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0446198242
• ISBN 13: 9780446198240
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 306