Thirty years ago, Walter Mosley busted open the LA noir crime novel, taking us to the backroom gin joints that Chandler never could. His laid-off worker turned detective, Easy Rawlins, has to navigate the racist seamier underside of the seamy underside of Los Angeles that most fictional gumshoes tread. It's a smoke-filled, bourbon-soaked, jazz-fueled and intensely atmospheric trek through the Harlem of the West Coast, expanding the idea of what LA noir could mean. Still one of the best detective novels I’ve read.
— DaveIt's 1948, and Easy Rawlins is on the trail of a missing woman in South Central L.A.