Showing results by author "Walter Mosley" in All Categories

Tommy's nickname is Lucky, but no one would think this crippled boy was blessed. Cursed with health problems and drawn into trouble more often than not, Tommy is the recipient of pity rather than admiration. He is nothing like his stepbrother Eric.

Detective Easy Rawlins returns in a mystery set in 1961 Los Angeles as Easy accepts a job searching for a beautiful woman nicknamed Black Betty who works as a housekeeper in Beverly Hills.

In this new mystery set in the Patty Hearst era of radical black nationalism and political abductions, a black ex-boxer self-named Uhuru Nolica, the leader of a revolutionary cell called Scorched Earth, has kidnapped Rosemary Goldsmith, the daughter of a weapons manufacturer, from her dorm at UC Santa Barbara. If they don't receive the money, weapons, and apology they demand, "Rose Gold" will die - horribly and publicly.

Picking up where Rose Gold left off in LA in the late 1960s, Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins finds his life in transition. He's ready to - finally - propose to his girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, and start a life together. And he's taken the money he got from the Rose Gold case and has, together with two partners, started a new detective agency. But inevitably a case gets in the way: Easy's friend, Mouse, introduces him to Rufus Tyler, a very old man everyone calls Charcoal Joe.

In 1992, Los Angeles burned. In the aftermath of the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots, a ground-breaking ceremony at the infamous intersection of Florence and Normandie unearths the body of a Korean liquor store owner. Black private eye Ivan Monk searches for the killer—many suspect the motives for the murder were racial. But then another body turns up, and while the FBI and the Rolling Daltons, the largest gang in the city, dog Monk’s trail, Monk questions who the real perpetrators are and whether he can prevent more from dying, including himself, before he uncovers the truth.

How can Leonid McGill say no to the beautiful young woman who walks into his office with a stack of cash? She's an artist, she tells him, who's escaped from poverty via marriage to a rich collector who keeps her on a stipend. But she says she fears for her life, and needs Leonid's help. Though Leonid knows better than to believe every word, this isn't a job he can afford to turn away, even as he senses that - if his family's misadventures don't kill him first - sorting out the woman's crooked tale will bring him straight to death's door.

An irresistible story of love and death, this latest Easy Rawlins mystery takes place during the devastating 1965 Watts riots. Easy's hunt for a killer reveals a new city emerging from the ashes—and a new life for Easy and his friends.

When Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the act he witnesses seems to dissolve all the boundaries he knows. He wants revenge but also something more. Killing Johnny Fry is the story of Cordell's dark, funny, soulful, and outrageously explicit sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life. It marks new territory for the best-selling author of Devil in a Blue Dress and countless other books; it will surprise, provoke, inspire, and make you blush.

Leonid McGill's spent a lifetime building up his reputation in the New York investigative scene. His seemingly infallible instinct and inside knowledge of the crime world make him the ideal man to help when Phillip Worry comes knocking. Phillip "Catfish" Worry is a 92-year-old Mississippi bluesman who needs Leonid's help with a simple task: Deliver a letter revealing the black lineage of a wealthy heiress and her corrupt father. Unsurprisingly, the opportunity to do a simple favor while shocking the prevailing elite is too much for Leonid to resist.

Martin Just wakes up one morning after what feels like, and might actually be, a centuries-long sleep with two new innate pieces of knowledge: Humanity is a virus destined to destroy all existence. And he is the Cure. Martin begins slipping into an alternate consciousness, with new physical strengths, to violently defend his family—the only Black family in their neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles—against pure evil.

Leonid McGill-the protagonist introduced in The Long Fall, the book that returned Walter Mosley to bestseller lists nationwide - is still fighting to stick to his reformed ways while the world around him pulls him in every other direction. He has split up with his girlfriend, Aura, because his new self won't let him leave his wife - but then Aura's new boyfriend starts angling to get Leonid kicked out of his prime, top-of-the­skyscraper office space.

In his essential writing guide, This Year You Write Your Novel, Walter Mosley supplied aspiring writers with the basic tools to write a novel in one year. In this complementary follow up, Mosley guides the writer through the elements of not just any fiction writing, but the kind of writing that transcends convention and truly stands out. How does one approach the genius of writers like Melville, Dickens, or Twain? In Elements of Fiction, Walter Mosley contemplates the answer.

Paris Minton is a man who would just as soon walk away from trouble as stand up to it. But in 1950s Los Angeles, sometimes trouble just comes and gets you. When one of L.A.'s wealthiest women hires Paris and his friend Fearless Jones to find a missing nephew, Paris steps into the a complex and terrifying corner of the black bourgeoisie, and wonders whom he should fear more - the people he's looking for or the people he's working for.

January 1970 finds Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, LA’s premier Black detective, at 50 years of age despite all expectations. He has a loving family, a beautiful home, and a thriving investigation agency. All is right with the world… and then Amethystine Stoller, his own personal Helen of Troy, arrives. Her ex-husband is missing. A simple enough case. But even as Easy takes his first step in the investigation he trips. He falls into the memory of things past. Little things, like loss, love, a world war, and a hunger that has eaten at him since he was a Black boy on his own.

No more excuses. "Let the lawn get shaggy and the paint peel from the walls," best-selling novelist Walter Mosley advises. Anyone can write a novel now, and in this essential book of tips, practical advice, and wisdom, Walter Mosley promises that the writer-in-waiting can finish it in one year. Mosley tells how to: create a daily writing regimen to fit any writer's needs - and how to stick to it, determine the narrative voice that's right for every writer's style, and get past those first challenging sentences and into the heart of a story.

In this scorching, mournful, often explicit, and never less than moving literary novel by the famed creator of the Easy Rawlins series, Debbie Dare, a black porn queen, has to come to terms with her sordid life in the adult entertainment industry after her tomcatting husband dies in a hot tub. Electrocuted. With another woman in there with him. Debbie decides she just isn't going to "do it anymore". But executing her exit strategy from the porn world is a wrenching and far from simple process.

Seven years ago, Zella Grisham came home to find her man, Harry Tangelo, in bed with her friend. The weekend before, $6.8 million had been stolen from Rutgers Assurance Corp., whose offices are across the street from where Zella worked. Zella didn't remember shooting Harry, but she didn't deny it either. The district attorney was inclined to call it temporary insanity - until the police found $80,000 from the Rutgers heist hidden in her storage space. For reasons of his own, Leonid McGill is convinced of Zella's innocence. But as he begins his investigation, his life begins to unravel.

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.

A masterful, moving novel about age, memory, and family from one of the literary icons of our time. Ptolemy Grey is 91 years old and has been all but forgotten - by his family, his friends, even himself - as he sinks into a lonely dementia. His grand-nephew, Ptolemy's only connection to the outside world, was recently killed in a drive-by shooting, and Ptolemy is too suspicious of anyone else to allow them into his life. Until he meets Robyn, his niece's 17-year-old lodger and the only one willing to take care of an old man at his grandnephew's funeral.

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' doorstep. He expects the worst, as usual. But they've come to ask for his help.