From Publishers Weekly
It ain't easy being Easy. Especially not now, as Mosley ( White Butterfly ) brings his much-admired, reluctant L.A. sleuth, Easy Rawlins, to the cusp of the 1960s without his wife and daughter, his real estate riches or the hopes and ambitions that fueled his earlier years. Easy must grab at the $400 he's offered to locate Elizabeth Eady, a missing housekeeper who several years and a few lifetimes away was "Black Betty," a sensual presence on the Houston streets where he grew up. Easy understands that Betty (". . . a great shark of a woman. Men died in her wake") has a mythical importance to him, but he doesn't know why the rich and dysfunctional California family she recently worked for is offering so much money to find her, or why her brother Marlon is also missing--and likely dead, given the spilled blood found in his place. Easy isn't always able to concentrate on the case. His pal Mouse, just out of the slammer, wants help finding the guy who sold him out to the cops; all the rage Mouse acts unthinkingly on, Easy feels too and struggles to contain. In measured, quietly emotive prose, Mosley moves his work away from conventional genre fiction, tinkering, abandoning and later returning to the mystery element. Nevertheless, the solution fully satisfies as Easy opts for smaller victories--not the white man's riches, but maybe a few bucks in his pocket and some time with the two adopted kids that now constitute his family. Author tour. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Mosley's distinctive black investigator, Easy Rawlins, has moved from Watts to West L.A. with his two adopted children, but trouble still follows him. Hired to locate a sultry female acquaintance from his early days in Houston, Easy searches for her gambler brother and questions her Beverly Hills employer, unwittingly provoking racist police harassment. Meanwhile, friend Raymond ("Mouse") has been released from prison and vows revenge on the snitch who put him there. Mosley, as usual, describes a historically correct ethos in deft, literate prose. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Easy Rawlins is back. And his fans won't be disappointed in the series' fourth novel. Rawlins is out to find Elizabeth Eady, "Black Betty." But nothing is ever simple for Easy. His small real estate empire is crumbling. His homicidal pal, Mouse, is out of prison and looking to kill somebody--maybe even Easy. Mosley's writing is strong, and he pulls together all the loose ends for a satisfying conclusion. Clay does a fine job capturing Easy's cadence and switching to the voices of other characters. His skill is most pronounced when high-strung Mouse begins to speak. A winning performance. P.B.J. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
It's summertime 1961, and the livin' isn't so easy for Easy Rawlins. His real-estate deals--kept secret to avoid the reprisals that a black landlord in postwar Los Angeles might expect from both black friends and white enemies--have mostly gone bad, his wife has left, and he's attempting to raise two kids on his own. Easy needs money bad, so when a white private eye offers two grand to help find Betty Eady, a name from Easy's distant past, he takes the job. Meanwhile, the lethal killer Mouse, Easy's oldest friend, is out of jail and looking for the man who set him up. As in the three previous installments in Mosley's acclaimed series, the case at hand is never really the center of attention. While Mosley develops a plot and generates tension as well as anyone working in crime fiction, he has always had bigger fish to fry. As we've watched Easy try to make a life for himself and his loved ones in South Central L.A. from World War II onward, we've witnessed the rise and fall of hope in the black community. As the civil rights movement gains momentum and Martin Luther King, Jr., comes to prominence on the national scale, Easy feels something very different on the streets: "I realized that I'd always be surrounded by violence and insanity. I saw it everywhere. . . . It was even in me. That feeling of anger, wrapped tight under my skin, in my hands. And it was getting worse."Just as he did with the war and the McCarthy era, Mosley gives us a recognizable moment in American history viewed through the eyes of a single black man. This perspective, rare in crime fiction, vivifies not only the black experience but the larger event as well. Here we feel the hot winds that would eventually ignite the Watts riots not as abstract issues in race relations, but as emotions in the hearts of individuals we have come to know and care about. In Easy's bitterness and in the bone-weary fatigue with which he greets each new act of senseless violence--whether the weapon is a white cop's fists or Mouse's Colt-.45--we feel the ineffable sadness that has come to envelop our urban landscape. Bill Ott


From Kirkus Reviews
It's 1961, and Easy Rawlins has lost most of what he had five years ago in White Butterfly (1992). Not only has his wife walked out with his daughter, but his real estate investments have left him broke, and he's moved out of his own building to a rental in West LA, where shamus Saul Lynx comes to ask him to find aging mantrap Elizabeth Eady, aka Black Betty. Easy goes looking for Betty's gambling brother Marlon, but finds nothing more of him than a bloody molar and a fat check from imperious Sarah Clarice Cain, daughter of the late, rich, unlamented Albert Cain. Why is Sarah so desperate to find Betty, and how is her disappearance tied to the police investigation of Albert's death? While he's pondering these questions, Easy finds big problems on his own doorstep. His investment in Freedom's Plaza is jeopardized by a smooth supermarket king who doesn't care for African-American competition; and his homicidal friend Mouse, sprung from jail after five years for manslaughter, is determined to identify and kill the witness who sent him there. It's high time the Easy Rawlins saga was recognized for the remarkable achievement it is: a snapshot social history of the black experience in postwar LA. This latest installment, teeming with violence, bitterness, and compassion, is Mosley's finest work yet. (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
San Diego Union TribunePerceptive and poignant, humorous and horrifying...a rare blend of top-flight entertainment and incisive social comment.


Book Description
1961: For most black Americans, these were times of hope. For former P.I. Easy Rawlins, Los Angeles's mean streets were never meaner...or more deadly. Ordinarily, Easy would have thrown the two bills in the sleazy shamus' face -- the white man who wanted him to find the notorious Black Betty, an ebony siren whose talent for all things rich and male took her from Houston's Fifth Ward to Beverly Hills. There was too much Easy wasn't being told, but he couldn't resist the prospect of seeing Betty again, even if it killed him....


About the Author
Walter Mosley is the author of the acclaimed Easy Rawlins series, the novels Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Fearless Jones, Blue Light, and RL's Dream, and a collection of stories, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, for which he received the Anisfield-Wolf Award. He was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York.

FROM OUR EDITORS

It's 1961, and Easy Rawlins's real estate empire is deep in the hole. Desperate for cash, Easy accepts money from the oily white detective Saul Lynx to track down a beautiful black woman whose raw sensuality has left a trail of chaos and mayhem in her wake.

ANNOTATION

A brilliant new mystery in the highly acclaimed Easy Rawlins series. In 1961 L.A., Easy is tracking down Elizabeth Eady, a.k.a. "Black Betty"--a stunning beauty with mayhem in her wake. Easy's search takes readers deep into America's racial dilemmas and the mysteries of human character.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The New York Times Book Review ended its rave for White Butterfly, the most recent novel in Walter Mosley's acclaimed mystery series, by saying "I can't wait to see where Easy Rawlins turns up next. And when." Black Betty holds the sure-to-be-bestselling answer. The place is Los Angeles. The year is 1961, the dawn of a hopeful era for America's black citizens. Easy Rawlins's quiet real-estate empire is deep in the hole, so he must accept $200 from the oily white private eye Saul Lynx to track down one Elizabeth Eady, aka "Black Betty." From her native Houston's Fifth Ward to her position as housekeeper for the immensely wealthy Cain family of Beverly Hills, Betty's stunning beauty and raw sensuality have left a trail of chaos and mayhem in her wake. To compound Easy's troubles, his murderous sidekick Mouse is due out of jail, and he has bloody revenge on his mind. Entertainment Weekly has said that "[Easy] Rawlins isn't just the best new series detective around, he might be the best American character to appear in quite some time." Easy's murder-strewn search for "Black Betty" takes him into the depths of America's racial dilemmas and the mysteries of human character - and his creator, Walter Mosley, to even greater heights of achievement in the American novel. It is that rare novel that tells a gripping, fast-paced story while it grapples with the biggest questions that haunt American life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Mosley's Easy Rawlins series continues when the down-and-out PI is hired to track down the notorious woman called Black Betty in early-1960s Los Angeles. (July)

Library Journal

Mosley's distinctive black investigator, Easy Rawlins, has moved from Watts to West L.A. with his two adopted children, but trouble still follows him. Hired to locate a sultry female acquaintance from his early days in Houston, Easy searches for her gambler brother and questions her Beverly Hills employer, unwittingly provoking racist police harassment. Meanwhile, friend Raymond (``Mouse'') has been released from prison and vows revenge on the snitch who put him there. Mosley, as usual, describes a historically correct ethos in deft, literate prose.

Library Journal

Mosley's distinctive black investigator, Easy Rawlins, has moved from Watts to West L.A. with his two adopted children, but trouble still follows him. Hired to locate a sultry female acquaintance from his early days in Houston, Easy searches for her gambler brother and questions her Beverly Hills employer, unwittingly provoking racist police harassment. Meanwhile, friend Raymond (``Mouse'') has been released from prison and vows revenge on the snitch who put him there. Mosley, as usual, describes a historically correct ethos in deft, literate prose. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/94.]

Sacred Fire

Black Betty is the fourth, and the strongest, installment in the Easy Rawlins mystery series. The time is the late 1940s, the place is Los Angeles, and the living is hard. Ezekial "Easy" Rawlins, a former soldier who is still hurting from the departure of his wife to Mississippi with another man, is facing pressure from his real estate dealings and from the challenges of raising two children. Desperate for work, he takes on an offer to find a woman, Elizabeth Eady, a.k.a. Black Betty, who has vanished into thin air. Her wealthy employer wants her back, and so the search begins. Add Mouse, Easy's sidekick, and murder and mayhem soon follow.

Mosley writes mystery, yes; but he also suffuses his stories with a deeply intimate knowledge of the black community and its struggles. This passage from Black Betty illustrates Mosley's skill at re-creating the surface and depth of life in the middle-class black communities of Los Angeles while at the same time addressing, in his two-fisted way, the existential issues that dog all African Americans: On the bus there were mainly old people and young mothers and teenagers coming in late to school. Most of them were black people. Dark-skinned with generous features. Women with eyes so deep that most men can never know them. Women like Betty who'd lost too much to be silly or kind. And there were the children, like Spider and Terry T once were, with futures so bleak it could make you cry just to hear them laugh. Because behind the music of their laughing you knew there was the rattle of chains. Chains we wore for no crime; chains we wore for so long that they melded with our bones. We all carry them but nobody can see it—not even most of us. All the way home I thought about freedom coming for us at last. But what about all those centuries in chains? Where do they go when you get free? All that and a mystery, too.
Mosley continues a tradition of African American detective fiction that uses this genre to explore issues of empowerment, a tradition begun by novelists like Chester Himes (If He Hollers Let Him Go and A Rage in Harlem), W. Adolphe Roberts (The Haunting Hand, 1926), and Rudolph Fisher (The Conjure Man Dies, 1932). Other books in the acclaimed Easy Rawlins series include Gone Fishing, Devil in a Blue Dress, A Little Yellow Dog, A Red Death, and White Butterfly.

AudioFile