Little Scarlet - VENDIDO!

Walter Mosley
Little Brown, July 2004


Rights licensed:
*** Brasil/Landscape ***
German/Argon,
UK/Orion,
French/Seuil,
Italian/Marco Tropea

Book description:

Easy Rawlins returns to solve a mystery set amid the flames of the hottest summer L.A. has ever seen.

Just after devastating riots tear through Los Angeles in 1965 - when anger is high and fear still smolders everywhere - the police turn up at Easy Rawlins’s doorstep. He expects the worst, as usual. But they’ve come to ask for his help.

A man was wrenched from his car by a mob at the riots’ peak and escaped into a nearby apartment building. Soon afterward, a redheaded woman known as Little Scarlet was found dead in that building - and the fleeing man is the obvious suspect. But the man has vanished.

The police fear that their presence in certain neighborhoods could spark a new inferno, so they ask Easy Rawlins to see what he can discover. The vanished man is the key, but he is only the beginning. Easy enlists the help of his longtime friend Mouse to break through the shroud. And what Easy finds is a killer whose rage, like that which burned in the city for weeks, is intrinsically woven around deep-set passions - feelings echoed within Easy himself.


Quotes and Reviews:
“I have been waiting since Devil in a Blue Dress for the Watts number of the series that has been implicit in it all along. Little Scarlet is beyond anything I could have imagined for subtlety, force, and undertow. The whole series amounts to one of the most sophisticated accounts of racism in America, but in this book the critique vibrates like a wire.….It’s a powerful novel, one of the deepest and most subtle portraits of American racism ever written.”
-—Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train and The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes

"Little Scarlet is a masterwork. Walter Mosley is one of America’s most exciting, incisive writers." —George Pelecanos, author of Hard Revolution

"Little Scarlet is a wonderful character driven novel—entertaining and pertinent to our times."
--Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and A Simple Habana Melody

Rawlins’s hunt for the killer reveals a new city emerging from the ashes, with the promise of a new life for Easy, Mouse, and his old friends Jackson Blue and Jewelle. Mosley’s lean and musical vernacular captures the heat and the rhythm of Los Angeles’ heart, where danger is the common currency of everyday life. Little Scarlet is further proof that Mosley is "a master of mystery" --New York Times Book Review

"Mosley has a unique voice that remains fresh and he tells a damn good story. Little Scarlet is a compelling portrait of a painful era, peopled by living, breathing, unforgettable characters. This may be Walter Mosley’s best." --Jonathan Kellerman, author of Therapy

"The best Easy novel in years!"--Library Journal (starred review)

"Easy Rawlins sizzles as Watts burns." --Kirkus (starred review)

"[A] powerful stand-alone novel, though longtime fans will appreciate how the series’ characters and racial themes have deepened over time." --Time Out New York

From Publishers Weekly
Set during the Watts riots of 1965, this eighth entry in Mosley’s acclaimed Easy Rawlins series (Bad Boy Brawly Brown, etc.) demonstrates the reach and power of the genre, combining a deeply involving mystery with vigorous characterizations and probing commentary about race relations in America. Easy Rawlins, 45, is—like the rest of black L.A.—angry: "the angry voice in my heart that urged me to go out and fight after all the hangings I had seen, after all of the times I had been called nigger and all of the doors that had been slammed in my face." But Easy stays out of the fiery streets until a white cop and his bosses recruit him to identify the murderer of a young black woman, Nola Payne; the cops suspect an unidentified white man whom Nola sheltered during the riots, and are worried that if they pursue the case, word will leak and the riots will escalate. Easy, an unlicensed PI who also works as a school custodian, agrees to investigate, drawing into his quest several series regulars, including the stone killer Mouse, the magical healer Mama Jo and his own family. There’s also a sexy young woman whose allure, like that of the violent streets, threatens to smash the life of integrity he has so carefully built. In time, Easy focuses on a homeless black man as the killer, not only of Nola but of perhaps 20 other black women, all of whom had hooked up with white men. This is Mosley’s best novel to date: the plot is streamlined and the language simple yet strong, allowing the serpentine story line to support Easy’s amazingly complex character and hypnotic narration as Mosley plunges us into his world and, by extension, the world of all blacks in white-run America. Fierce, provocative, expertly entertaining, this is genre writing at its finest.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Mosley returns to top form in this ninth installment of his celebrated Easy Rawlins series. In the early volumes, the calendar moved ahead almost one decade per book, but Mosley has been lingering through the 1960s--rightfully so, given the far-reaching impact of that turbulent era on African American life. Here it’s the last days of the Watts riots in 1966, and a black woman, nicknamed Little Scarlet, has been found murdered in her apartment, the same building that an unidentified white man appeared to enter after escaping a mob of rioters. Did the white man commit the murder? The LAPD wants answers quickly, which is why Rawlins is asked to investigate. As has been the case throughout this series, the mystery at hand serves as a window opening on a historical moment. As Easy investigates, he finds himself forced to make sense of his own contrary feelings about the riots--his sadness at the loss of life and property in his community set against his recognition of inevitability, of the fact that the riots were expressing out in the open the anger every black man and woman had been forced to hide: "Now it’s said and nothing will ever be the same. That’s good for us, no matter what we lost. And it could be good for white people, too." Mosley remains a master at showing his readers slices of history from the inside, from a perspective that is all those things history usually isn’t: intimate, individual, and passionate. Bill Ott

Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.



About the author:
WALTER MOSLEY is the author of nineteen critically acclaimed books and his work has been translated into twenty-one languages. His popular mysteries featuring Easy Rawlins began with Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990. Others in the series include A Red Death, White Butterfly, Black Betty and A Little Yellow Dog (both of which were New York Times bestsellers). Last year, Easy Rawlins returned with Bad Boy Brawly Brown and Six Easy Pieces.
Two movies have been made from his work including the 1995 TriStar release of "Devil in A Blue Dress," produced by Jonathan Demme, directed by Carl Franklin, and starring Denzel Washington and Jennifer Beals. "Always Outnumbered," was produced by HBO/NYC and Palomar Pictures film, directed by Michael Apted and starred Laurence Fishburne, Natalie Cole, Cicely Tyson and Bill Cobbs.
He has won numerous awards including the Anisfield Wolf Award, an honor given to works that increase the appreciation and understanding of race in America. This year he was honored by Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute with a "Risktaker Award" given to him by Sundance for both his creative and activist efforts. Also this year, he was given an honorary doctorate by The City College.