Little Scarlet: An Easy Rawlins Novel by Walter Mosley Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Little Scarlet: An Easy Rawlins Novel
Book Review: The Throes of Violence
Summary: 4 Stars
Lucky Dime Liquors has been burned to the ground. Manny Massman, the owner, cries. National Guardsmen are present in Watts. Easy Rawlins has his office over the shop of a cobbler. He has kept himself inside, filled with pent-up rage.
Detective Melvin Suggs seeks him out. Rawlins fought in a segregated army. Now there is an angry voice in his heart. A white man may have choked and killed Nola Payne. Nola was trying to save him. He was being chased by rioters. Rawlins is starting to feel a connection between himself and the people caught up in the throes of violence.
Easy Rawlins is forty-five years old. Mouse is a serious man who has killing in his blood. Easy had to remove him from his telephone listing. Being the friend of Raymond Alexander, (Mouse), gives Easy access to the neighbors of the dead woman. Easy is trying to carry out an investigation for the LAPD who fear official action will result in more rioting. Easy learns that Nola had been an organized woman.
At Florence Avenue Bookshop Easy finds out that Paris Minton, the owner, managed to keep his shop from burning down by having Fearless Jones, next to Mouse the most dangerous man in L.A. and a former commando, guard the shop with him. The Watts riot is the beginning of the break up of the community.
Easy goes to find Mouse at the Cox Bar. He discovers there that Nola had a friend, Loverboy, whose real name is Nate Shelby, a car thief. After the riots Mouse enters the underground economy, buying and selling the looted goods. Easy and Mouse join forces to shake Nate Shelby out of the tree. Easy finds the white man Nola saved through finding the ownership information in the car Nate has taken. The man is still alive, and probably not guilty of the murder.
A bum, Harold, is a suspect in the murder. In awful fashion it is learned that there has probably been a serial killer at work and cops have overlooked many of the clues. Easy himself went to the police in regard to an earlier homicide and basically was given the brush off by the authorities. This is a fabulous book. Little Scarlett is a pet name for Nola.
Book Review: buy this book...
Summary: 4 Stars
W. Mosley is a solid writer who never seems to let me down. Anything with his name on it I'll read.Book Review: Fantastic
Summary: 5 Stars
Mr.Mosley keeps you on the edge from beginning to end! That's what makes a great writer, and he does that with this book,believe it!Book Review: Fascinating!
Summary: 4 Stars
This book was loaned to me because someone thought I might like it. I've read most of Robert Parker and Elmore Leonard's novels and I enjoy a good mystery. I had heard of Walter Moseley but didn't know much about his books.
I'm not quite old enough to remember the Watts riots. I only know what I've read and heard from people who watched it on TV or were sent there with the National Guard. I realize that this is a novel and that there are parts that are fictional but there is some history in it.
Moseley's Easy Rawlins has to figure out who killed a woman and why this one person, out of the many who died in the riots, is so important in the bigger picture. Easy has been in and around Watts for years and you have to figure that Moseley was just waiting to write a book with this backdrop. Since reading Little Scarlet, I've gone back and read the first four books in the series. In all of the books, there is always a sense of the times for a black man in the U.S. and in Los Angeles but this story gives us one specific, important instance to build a very compelling story.
For the mystery, the characters, the perspective and the history, this is a great novel. I know people who don't read a lot of mysteries who really liked this book because it is so much more.
Of course, if you haven't read the earlier books first, you will have some plot points revealed in Little Scarlet that will take away from the previous stories when you do read them. Maybe this isn't best of his novels but if you only read one Easy Rawlins novel, I think this should be it.
Book Review: I LOVED IT
Summary: 5 Stars
Because I grew up there, because I was a burgeoning adolescent at the time of its setting, because the events in this story were the ones that began the formation of my view of the socio-political world... and above all because it was well written and entertaining... I LOVED IT! Mr. Mosley has skillfully driven another of his fiction-vehicles to a place where the reader hits pay dirt. For those who might not otherwise have a clue, here is a cruise through understanding what the '65 Watts Riots were about. For those of us who know the bitter-sweet road from our own journeys, he takes us on a trip down memory lane that can renew focus, sharpening the edges of our consciousness and memory.