A Red Death (Easy Rawlins Series #2) »

A genre-bending author who can move from science-fiction to mysteries, Walter Mosley is perhaps best-known -- and loved -- for his 1940s and 50s noir crime novels starring the cool, complex detective Easy Rawlins.

It's 1953, a time when Red-baiting was official policy, and racial tensions boiled. Easy Rawlins is in deep trouble. A corrupt, racist IRS agent is breathing down his neck about some unpaid taxes. His only out: cut a deal with the FBI to infiltrate the First African Baptist Church and spy on a former World War II resistance fighter suspected of stealing some top secret government plans.

But the IRS isn't Easy's only problem. His life becomes even more complicated and dangerous when his old flame EttaMae Harris shows up with her murderous husband, Easy's best friend, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, hard on her heels. And then killings begin, and Easy finds himself playing the role of betrayed and betrayer - and the prime suspect.

Publishers Weekly

This is the second novel in Mosley's superb series featuring Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator living in 1950s Los Angeles. In July Norton will publish White Butterfly , a third Mosley mystery starring Rawlins, which received a starred review in PW (Fiction Forecasts, May 4).