Showing results by author "Walter Mosley" in Private Investigators

Ezekiel "Easy" Porterhouse Rawlins is an unlicensed private investigator turned hard-boiled detective always willing to do what it takes to get things done in the racially charged, dark underbelly of Los Angeles. But when Easy is approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran - a young White man who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a White woman from a Black man - he knows he shouldn't take the case.

January 1970 finds Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, LA’s premier Black detective, at 50 years of age despite all expectations. He has a loving family, a beautiful home, and a thriving investigation agency. All is right with the world… and then Amethystine Stoller, his own personal Helen of Troy, arrives. Her ex-husband is missing. A simple enough case. But even as Easy takes his first step in the investigation he trips. He falls into the memory of things past. Little things, like loss, love, a world war, and a hunger that has eaten at him since he was a Black boy on his own.

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.

In this new mystery set in the Patty Hearst era of radical black nationalism and political abductions, a black ex-boxer self-named Uhuru Nolica, the leader of a revolutionary cell called Scorched Earth, has kidnapped Rosemary Goldsmith, the daughter of a weapons manufacturer, from her dorm at UC Santa Barbara. If they don't receive the money, weapons, and apology they demand, "Rose Gold" will die - horribly and publicly.

Life for Easy is uncharacteristically...easy. He's set up his own agency and is about to propose to his sweetheart, Bonnie. But all that changes when his old friend, Mouse - one of the deadliest men in America - appears at his door, asking for a small favour. The favour is to help the son of a friend of Charcoal Joe who has been wrongly imprisoned. Charcoal Joe is a mythical figure in LA, a man who pulls all the strings but is known to very few.

In New York, if you have a problem no one else can solve, you call Leonid McGill. Ex-boxer, hard drinker, in a business that trades in cash and favours, McGill's an old-school PI working a city that's got fancy all around him. When McGill is approached by a small-time office manager, he declines the case. He has better things to do than track down the man's long-lost cousin, who is about to inherit millions. But then McGill's office is broken into, and his potential client is found dead.

In 1992, Los Angeles burned. In the aftermath of the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots, a ground-breaking ceremony at the infamous intersection of Florence and Normandie unearths the body of a Korean liquor store owner. Black private eye Ivan Monk searches for the killer—many suspect the motives for the murder were racial. But then another body turns up, and while the FBI and the Rolling Daltons, the largest gang in the city, dog Monk’s trail, Monk questions who the real perpetrators are and whether he can prevent more from dying, including himself, before he uncovers the truth.