Walter Mosley

In a Los Angeles bar, "Easy" Rawlins, a black war veteran just fired from his job, wonders how he'll pay his mortgage. DeWitt Albright, a quietly vicious white man, walks in and offers Easy good money if he'll find Daphne Monet. Easy Rawlins, a tough World War II veteran and detective, is hired by a financier and gangster to locate Daphne Monet, a search that leads him from elegant boardrooms to the raucous jazz joints of late 1940s Los Angeles.

A beautiful young woman walks into PI Leonid McGill's office with a stack of cash. She's an artist, she tells Leonid, who's escaped poverty via marriage to a rich collector. A rich collector with two ex-wives whose deaths are shrouded in mystery. She says she fears for her life, and needs Leonid's help. Will sorting out the woman's crooked tale bring Leonid straight to death's door?

"Bestselling author Walter Mosley has proven himself a master of narrative tension, both with his extraordinary fiction and gripping writing for television. The Awkward Black Man collects seventeen of Mosley's most accomplished short stories to display the full range of his remarkable talent. Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories - heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved,...

It is 1965, and the devastating Watts riots are ravaging Los Angeles. A white man attempts to escape from a mob by running into a nearby apartment building. A few days later he is accused of killing a woman known as Little Scarlet who is found dead in the building. But when Easy Rawlins starts to investigate, he suspects the killer to be someone else-someone whose rage is racially motivated and as deep as his passion. For those who always wanted to...

"After being approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a white woman from a black man, Easy embarks on an investigation that takes him from mountaintops to the desert, through South Central and into sex clubs and the homes of the fabulously wealthy, facing hippies, the mob, and old friends perhaps more dangerous than anyone else."--Publisher description. 1969. Easy Rawlins, the Black private...

Investigating the murder of a client he initially refused to help, Leonid navigates difficult personal elements in his own life while uncovering dark secrets about the victim's old-money family and its missing heiress.

Alfonse Rinaldo, the mysterious power behind the throne at City Hall, the fixer who seems to control every little thing that happens in New York City, has a problem that even he can't fix -- and he's come to Leonid McGill for help. It seems a young woman has disappeared, leaving murder in her wake, and it means everything to Rinaldo to track her down.

"Two people brought together by a horrific act are united in a common cause by the powers of the Silver Box. The two join to protect humanity from destruction by an alien race, the Laz, hell-bent on regaining control over the Silver Box, the most destructive and powerful tool in the universe. The Silver Box will stop at nothing to prevent its former master from returning to being, even if it means finishing the earth itself" -- Two people struggle...