Walter Mosley left readers hanging at the end of Blonde Faith, as Easy Rawlins plunged to a certain death. Easy returns from the dead in Little Green, but he's a changed man living on what can only be borrowed time--and it takes a mission from his friend Mouse to bring him fully back to the land of the living. Barely able to leave his bed, he embarks on a search for the titular "Little Green," a bookish young black man who disappeared while tripping on acid. Easy is a hip Ulysses as he voyages through late-1960s Los Angeles with its hippies, drugs, racist cops--and a little murder and fighting thrown in for good measure.
From his roots as a returning World War II veteran to his career as an aging private investigator in the tumultuous 1960s, Easy's personal timeline has enabled Mosley to guide readers through the 20th-century African-American experience over the course of 12 novels. This mystery is the next leg of our journey through the shifting tides of race relations, as always with Easy's steady hand on the helm. And Mosley is never one to paint his characters, whatever their race, in broad strokes; his portraits are always tempered with the nuance of personal experience. If the whole picture reveals hard truths, they serve only to help us better understand our world. Like Easy, Mosley's "kinda nice comes from a place people like it rough." That's what keeps his fans coming back for more. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher