It's 1953 in Red-baiting, blacklisting Los Angeles, a moral tar pit ready to swallow Easy Rawlins. Easy is out of 'the hurting business' and into the housing (and favor) business when a racist IRS agent nails him for tax evasion. Special Agent Darryl T. Craxton, FBI, offers to bail him out if he agrees to infiltrate the First American Baptist Church and spy on alleged communist organizer Chaim Wenzler. That's when the murders begin....

The police don't show up on Easy Rawlins's doorstep until the third girl dies. It's Los Angeles, 1956, and it takes more than one murdered black girl before the cops get interested. Now they need Easy. As he says: 'I was worth a precinct full of detectives when the cops needed the word in the ghetto.' But Easy turns them down. He's married now, a father -- and his detective days are over. Then a white college coed dies the same brutal death, and the cops put the heat on Easy: If he doesn't help, his best friend is headed for jail. So Easy's back, walking the midnight streets of Watts and the darker, twisted avenues of a cunning killer's mind....

In the beginning...there was Ezekiel 'Easy' Rawlins and Raymond 'Mouse' Alexander -- two young men setting out in life, hitting the road in a 'borrowed' '36 Ford headed for Pariah, Texas. The volatile Mouse wants to retrieve money from his stepfather so he can marry his EttaMae. But on their steamy bayou excursion, Mouse will choose murder as a way out, while Easy's past liaison with EttaMae floats precariously in his memory. Easy and Mouse are coming of age -- and everything they ever knew about friendship and about themselves is coming apart at the seams....

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....

Walter Mosley, 'one of crime fiction's brightest stars' (People), returns to mysteries at last-with a dazzling new thriller set in the deadly back alleys of 1950s L.A.... Bookshop owner Paris Minton is minding his own business when a brief encounter with a beautiful stranger gets him beaten, shot at, robbed, and then burned out of store and home. Paris needs help but his secret weapon-brave, reckless WWII hero Fearless Jones-is in jail. Vowing to dish out some heavy justice, Paris plots to get Jones back on the street. But when these two men come together, they'll find themselves trapped in a bewildering vortex of sex, money, and murder-and a dicey endgame that's littered with dangerous players...

Rejacketed and reissued alongside Mosley's new novel, }Fearless Jones{, and featuring his most popular character, Easy Rawlins.

Nine years after being released from prison, ex-convict Socrates Forlow is struggling to rebuild his life--with a girlfriend, a steady job, and a pet--but his efforts to maintain his principles and do the right thing is complicated when the police make him their prime suspect for every neighborhood crime. Reprint. 45,000 first printing.

From Spike Lee's encouragement of independent, community fundraising to Joycelyn Elders's warning about the failings of our 'sick-care' system to Stanley Crouch's disputation on 'heroic' versus 'anarchic' individuality, Black Genius is an exceptional, unique colloquy. Conceived by acclaimed novelist Walter Mosley and sponsored by the New York University Africana Studies Program and the Institute of African American Affairs, this book originated as a series of community conversations where 'visionaries with solutions' shared powerful views on personal and communal struggles, triumphs, and aspirations. The list of contributors suggests the range of perspectives and talents brought to bear on such issues as economics, political power, work, authority, and culture. Black Genius is a point of departure for vigorous discussion of our current realities and goals for the future-and a portrait of 'genius' that leads the way to enriching American life in the twenty-first century.

New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley introduces an 'astonishing character' (Los Angeles Times Book Review) in this acclaimed collection of entwined tales. Meet Socrates Fortlow, a tough ex-con seeking truth and redemption in South Central Los Angeles -- and finding the miracle of survival.

'I either committed a crime or had a crime done to me every day I was in jail. Once you go to prison you belong there.' Socrates Fortlow has done his time: twenty-seven years for murder and rape, acts forged by his huge, rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered rooms in an abandoned building in Watts. Working for the Bounty supermarket, and moving perilously close to invisibility, it is Socrates who throws a lifeline to a drowning man: young Darryl, whose shaky path is already bloodstained and fearsome. In a place of violence and hopelessness, Socrates offers up his own battle-scarred wisdom that can turn the world around.

Il blues. E' questa la musica inventata dagli schiavi per esprimere la propria sofferenza, che Soupspoon, il vecchio bluesman, gravemente malato, ha suonato in migliaia di club e di bar. Chi tenderà la mano a questo vecchio negro che se ne sta lì come un cane? Chi ha ancora voglia di stare ad ascoltare miti e leggende in una New York dove contano solo il denaro e il profitto? Kiki, giovane donna bianca verso la quale si è rifugiato, anch'essa sfuggita a un Sud che non riesce a rinnegare, sarà la sua Provvidenza, la sua infermiera, la sua amica. Accanto a lei sarà in grado di raccontare la storia del blues, questa musica del diavolo che è tutta la sua vita.

Soupspoon Wise is dying on the unforgiving streets of New York City, years and worlds away from the Mississippi delta, where he once jammed with blues legend Robert 'RL' Johnson. It was an experience that burned indelibly into Soupspoon's soul -- never mind that they said RL's gift came from the Devil himself. Now it's Soupspoon's turn to strike a deal with a stranger. An alcoholic angel of mercy, Kiki Waters isn't much better off than Soupspoon, but she too is a child of the South, and knows its pull. And she is determined to let Soupspoon ride out the final notes of his haunting blues dream, to pour out the remarkable tale of what he's seen, where he's been -- and where he's going.

Winner of the 1996 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award in Fiction

When a powerful government official scheduled to speak to a group of millionaires turns up dead, the business world clamors for a solution, and Nero Wolfe takes the case. Reissue.