Parker, Sue Grafton – who have built up a hefty ouevre, start creating a supporting cast of characters that they like to parade out at a moment’s notice and deftly sprinkle amongest the pages but in this case it’s a double-edged sword. The first book, the fine Devil in a Blue Dress, occurred in the late forties this one offers a window into the height of the mid-sixties hippie/flower power era. Each Rawlins novel not only features a different color in the title (like John MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels) but takes place during a different time period. Rawlins is a black private investigator and Mosley’s walking polemic against the virulent racism that African-Americans endured in post-World War II Los Angeles. Transitioning to barely mobile for Easy isn’t as smooth as Sunday morning, and he needs something to keep him on his feet, so he starts drinking a voodoo elixir called Gator’s Blood.

Evander “Little Green” Noon was last seen on Sunset Strip, the Los Angeles home of the beatnik’s unwashed cousin, the hippie.

Once again, Easy asserts his reign over the City of (Fallen) Angels.Easy Rawlins has just woken up from a two month long semi-coma and he’s immediately tasked to track down a missing young man for his pal, Ray Alexander aka Mouse. Written with Mosley’s signature grit and panache, this engrossing and atmospheric mystery is not only a trip back in time, it is also a tough-minded exploration of good and evil, and of the power of guilt and redemption. Fueled by an elixir called Gator’s Blood, brewed by the conjure woman Mama Jo, Easy experiences a physical, spiritual, and emotional resurrection, but peace and love soon give way to murder and mayhem. True to form, the tough WWII veteran survives, and soon his murderous sidekick Mouse has him back cruising the mean streets of L.A., in all their psychedelic 1967 glory, to look for a young black man, Evander “Little Green” Noon, who disappeared during an acid trip. We last saw Easy in 2007’s Blonde Faith, fighting for his life after his car plunges over a cliff. In the incendiary and fast-paced Little Green, he returns from the brink of death to investigate the dark side of L.A.’s 1960s hippie haven, the Sunset Strip. Eleven books later, Easy Rawlins is one of the few private eyes in contemporary crime fiction who can be called iconic and immortal. When Walter Mosley burst onto the literary scene in 1990 with his first Easy Rawlins mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress-a combustible mixture of Raymond Chandler and Richard Wright-he captured the attention of hundreds of thousands of readers (including future president Bill Clinton).

Little green by walter mosley