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Summary: African American Men are Real Life Heroes
Review: Once again, Walter Mosley makes me fall in love with an African American everyman, Fearless Jones. Walter Mosley's work is so gripping, and never ceases to please. His flawed, yet principled, African American men, make you think twice about the ordinary every day working African American men that you may pass in your daily travels. I love Walter Mosley... He is pure genius.
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Summary: African American Men are Real Life Heroes
Review: Once again, Walter Mosley makes me fall in love with an African American everyman, Fearless Jones. Walter Mosley's work is so gripping, and never ceases to please. His flawed, yet principled, African American men, make you think twice about the ordinary every day working African American men that you may pass in your daily travels. I love Walter Mosley... He is pure genius.
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Summary: Being Black in the 1950s--powerful
Review: Paris Minton has it made--he owns a used bookstore so he can read all day and he's one of the few black entrepeneurs in the 1950s Watts (Los Angeles). When a beautiful woman walks into his shop, though, he knows he is in trouble--and boy is he right.Fortunately, Paris has a friend who can deal with trouble. Once he bails Fearless Jones out of jail, he has a fighting chance and the two of them spend the rest of this fine novel battling for their lives, and trying to uncover the secret to a suspected multimillion dollar fortune. Author Walter Mosley does a wonderful job describing black life in the 1950s--where police brutality against blacks was expected and where driving with a white woman could get a black man lynched. Even better, Mosley develops two characters in Paris and Fearless who, although completely different, both pursue their goals of justice despite terrible obstacles. I found FEARLESS JONES to be a riveting mystery. The novel is not perfect--the mystery had a few loose ends I would have liked to see wrapped up, but these are minor quibbles that shouldn't interfere with the reader's enjoyment. Excellent and highly recommended.
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Summary: Intriguing mystery with sharp social overtones.
Review: Paris Minton is an unlikely protagonist for a mystery novel. An African American man, approaching middle age, he runs a used bookstore in a 1950s LA ghetto. He doesn't make much money from his business, but that's not why he has the shop. He just wants the chance to read his books and be left alone. That dream ends the day a beautiful woman named Elana Love walks in the door. "Fearless Jones" features an improbable hero, perhaps, but a classic setup for a hardboiled story. The comparisons to Mosley's brilliant Easy Rawlins series are natural and deserved. Both are set in similar times and deal with similar themes. The character of Paris Minton, though, adds a new dimension to the story. A thoughtful, literate man, he's not very handy with his fists, awkward with guns, and a patsy for a gorgeous woman. Most hard-boiled characters are just that: hard. Paris, though, is far softer than most, and more interesting for it. "Fearless Jones" once again demonstrates that Walter Mosley is one of the finest writers working today. His sharp eye for race relations, human nature, and the changing face of America would be excellent contributions to any novel. When added to a solid, engrossing mystery, they take his work to a higher level that few can match. Mosley is a treasure who should be read by all.
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Summary: (Why)is Paris' (store) burning?
Review: Previously, the only contemporary novelist whose works I picked up without prior qualifying information, even if all that entailed was perusal of the the book jacket, was Walter Mosley. As an example, I just assumed Socrates Fortlow was working on a chain gang because he decided to take an excursion back to Indiana and was arrested. So now, I at least make an effort to determine if the book is fictional; I have yet to be disappointed (and my assessment does include BLUE LIGHT) by any of his books. FEARLESS JONES is another impressive offering. It appears Mr. Mosley cannot escape comparisons to Hammett, Chandler, MacDonald, and in many quarters, Himes and Goines. At this juncture, his immense talent has transcended the noir detective mystery genre; he is a nonpareil storyteller but human nature seems to demand the real value of one commodity can only be defined in terms of a peer product. With the advent of new protagonists Tristan Jones and Paris Minton, Mr. Mosley has affixed the 'early Mosley' to the list. This book has much of the aura and appeal of the Rawlins series; at times I found myself in anticipation of an encounter with Easy or Mouse at the jailhouse; in one of the afterhours joints or by mutual acquiantance with a peripheral character introduced in this story (No, it did not happen). Paris the diminutive, bookwormish shopkeeper serves as the narrator; he and Fearless comprise a new 'buddy' team destined to grace several tales. As this story of the search for a mysterious, manipulative and intimidatingly attractive woman named Elana Love progressed, I sensed many of the characteristics so familiar to Easy and Mouse now engendered in Paris and Fearless, though not necessarily as mirror images or juxtaposed characters from different novels. Mr. Mosley infuses more wry wit and self-deprecating humor in Paris' characteriztion than I recall from any person appearing in prior books. Fearless is the dedicated, non-judgmental friend I think we all aspire to know at least once in our lifetimes, hopefully with appreciably less of a propensity to attract lethal entanglements. The duo is perfectly complementary. Where Paris is restrained, marginally unconfident and somewhat self-absorbed, Fearless is volatile, decisive and curiously altruistic. With his trenchant prose, Mr. Mosley injects more social commentary than was evident in the earlier series but he never loses sight of the fact he is spinning a tale rather than espousing a philosophy. It is an astonishingly quick read, with multiple action sequences but regrettably, also a few flaws, some on the penumbra but a couple within the critical path which I will not address since the book is a mystery and the few missteps are not sufficiently consequential to significantly diminish cumulative value. The ending, however, in my opinion is far too compressed. Truncation was unneccessary to set up the next book and at just over 300 pages the addition of another 50-75 so to effectively wrap the package in a more satisfying manner would not have been unwelcome. With that caveat, FEARLESS JONES, is a grand introduction to what I expect to be a great new series from Mr. Mosley.
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Summary: NO-HOLDS-BARRED READING OF A RIVETING THRILLER
Review: Rather than reprising his popular central character, Easy Rawlins, deft wordsmith Walter Mosley introduces an equally intriguing hero - Fearless Jones. Again, Mosley shines at depicting black characters struggling to survive in an inhospitable white world. When Paris Minton's book shop door opens and gorgeous Elan Love walks in, so does trouble. Paris is a laid back black man content to run his store in the Watts area of 1950s LA. He's ill prepared to deal with all the woes that beset him such as being used for gun shot practice, being robbed, and seeing his business go up in flames. There's little choice for Paris except to send an SOS to his war veteran buddy, Fearless Jones - a man who more than lives up to his sobriquet. The pair embark on a surprise riddled chase fraught with excitement and danger. TV and film actor Peter Francis James gives tension filled voice to this riveting thriller.
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Summary: I couldn't sleep,
Review: So it's 2:30 in the morning and I know I'm sleepy but I just need to know what's going to happen to Paris, Frearless, and this woman, who's name happens to be Love. Women, (sigh) Paris is a push over, he gets his car stolen, his money stolen, his store burned to the ground, he gets the crap slapped out of hisself. So he has to go bail his so called friend out of jail so that he can fight his battles.I must say Paris did end up having some smarts about hisself after all. Frearless, I liked Fearless but he was a little to wierd sometimes,taliking to dead white men and carrying on. The most important part of the book...well the part that was important to me was Paris telling his story about how he came to be in LA. This white librarian from his home town, told him point blank you can look, but you will never be able to touch, cause these books are for white children and he would never be able to use that library as long as he was black she didn't care how good he could read. So he left small, town USA and moved to LA where he said he could read all the books he wanted regardless of his skin color.
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Summary: dreadful
Review: Something about this book just didn't click for me. I love mysteries, but I just never appreciated what was going on between Leon, Elana, the Reverend Grove, Sol, the nazis, and the Israeli spies. Too many characters had odd parts that complicated the action. This was just a very disjointed, rambling story.
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Summary: Not like Easy Rawlins...
Review: The story begins will Paris Minton who is a successful bookstore owner until he meets Elana Love. Within 24 hours of their initial meeting, Paris is beaten, his store burned to the ground and robbed. Paris enlists the help of his friend Fearless Jones to help him find Ms. Love and who burned his store. After, the first few chapters of the book the plot becomes very confusing and difficult to read. I had to actually force myself to finish. Fearless Jones was about 100 pages too long. The last few chapters in my opinion seem more a rush to hurry up and tie things together. The only reason why I finish the book was to find out who burned Paris's store. Fearless Jones and Paris Minton were well-developed characters but with a weak plot they just didn't stand out like Mouse and Easy Rawlins from Devil In a Blue Dress. I hope the next Fearless mystery is shorter and better than the first. --JeT
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Summary: Yet another disappointment
Review: This is a thin, weak novel, a complete disappointment, much in the same way that more recent titles by Elmore Leonard, David Lindsey, Vachss, Burke, and even Michael Connolley have proven to be. Mosley joins a growing list of supposedly established writers in this field whose books I will no longer read.
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