Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: This is my first Walter Mosley book and I loved it! It had suspense, mystery, drama and funny one liners. Mosley has a great flow in bringing you into the life of Easy Rawlins and once you get there you want more!!
I am definitely going to buy more of his books as they are great reads!!
Rating:
Summary: Compelling and thoughtful. Definitely recommended
Review: Watts is burning. Days of rage and violence, looting and fire--and now the police have a nightmare on their hands. The body of a young black woman--whose aunt is telling everyone who listened that a white man raped and murdered her. If that word gets out on the dangerous Los Angeles streets, Watts will explode again. The police don't have the contacts they need in the black community to solve the crime and turn to Easy Rawlins.
Easy doesn't trust the cops. He knows they are more interested in protecting their rears than in finding a killer--that black women are murdered all the time while the cops look the other way. But Easy cares. While Los Angeles still smolders, he sets off on a quixotic quest for a small measure of justice.
Author Walter Mosley makes the dangerous streets of 1965 Los Angeles come alive. Black men and women smolder in resentment while whites tremble in fear and rage. The men who populate Easy Rawlins' world aren't nice--they fight, steal, sleep around, even kill--but they are real and vital.
Using his contacts in the black underworld, and his gift of the gab--as well as a letter from the deputy police chief that barely keeps him from being beaten by scared cops a number of times, Easy finds the white man who saw the dead woman last. But Easy's instincts tell him that this is not a killer--which means that the real killer is somewhere on the burning streets.
LITTLE SCARLET is powerful stuff. Combining a solid mystery, compelling insights into the conflict between races, and Mosley's strengths in exploring what it means to be a man in 20th century black America, SCARLET grabbed me and pulled me along for a dynamite ride. If you enjoy mystery and an author who mixes humor, danger, and tragedy in a compelling blend, you'll be happy you picked up this one.
Rating:
Summary: Mosley at the top of his form
Review: Yarns involving crime and punishment are the excuses cultural philosopher Walter Mosley uses to draw us into his explication of the relationship among blacks and whites who find themselves living in the same world. In Little Scarlet, Easy Rawlins goes out into Los Angeles in the immediate aftermath of the Watts riots to find a white man the police believe killed a young black woman who sheltered him from marauders who attacked him during the riots. The police fear that investigating the crime themselves would draw attention to the crime and that its white-on-black nature would spark further rioting. Through the story pass the many and varied personalities familiar from earlier Easy Rawlins novels. As in most Easy Rawlins stories, finding the bad guy is secondary to helping the reader see why blacks think as they do in Los Angeles. Mosley's trenchant and direct style does this unambiguously.
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