After 13 Easy Rawlins mysteries (most recently Rose Gold), Walter Mosley has honed his many characters to a crisp edge. A well-read African American with a taste for jazz and fine clothes, Easy moves just as comfortably in the offices and restaurants of West L.A. as he does in the barbershops and bars of Watts. When useful, he consults with both Ju-Ju seers and high-ranking police friends. As he describes himself, "I'm 90 percent pragmatist and the rest superstition." He also carries a gun.
Charcoal Joe features many of Easy's broad swath of friends, including Raymond "Mouse" Alexander ("one of the most dangerous men alive"); his right hand, Fearless Jones; industry executive Jackson Blue; and LAPD's Melvin Suggs. Mouse asks Easy to take a case helping notoriously powerful criminal Rufus "Charcoal Joe" Tyler. Easy owes Mouse and takes the case even though a bartender friend warns him off: "[Joe] don't play according to our rules.... If you after him--stop. If he want somethin' from you then give it up and move on." Bartenders are rarely wrong. Before long, Easy's persistent digging leads him to mob hitmen, money-laundering schemes and a string of corpses across the sprawl of Los Angeles. More insidious are the racial roadblocks put in his way by low-rent diner servers, high-rise security guards and belligerent traffic cops. He hates it but understands where the prejudice comes from: "I was a black man in a brown suit asking directions that would take me into the middle of a white neighborhood." Charcoal Joe is another winner in Mosley's long string of Easy Rawlins triumphs. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.