Racial tensions and America's civil rights movement have previously figured into Walter Mosley's series about sometimes-sleuth Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins. But Bad Boy Brawly Brown turns what had been a background element into compelling surface tension. The year is 1964, and though Easy seems settled into honest work as a Los Angeles custodian, he's having other problems--notably, his adopted son's wish to quit school and lingering remorse over the death (in A Little Yellow Dog) of his homicidal crony, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander. Yet he remains willing to do "favors" for folks in need. So, when Alva Torres comes to him, worried that her son, Brawly Brown, will get into trouble running with black revolutionaries, Easy agrees to find the young man and "somehow ... get him back home." His first day on the job, however, Rawlins stumbles across Alva's ex-husband--murdered--and he's soon dodging police, trying to connect a black activist's demise to a weapons cache, and exposing years of betrayal that have made Brawly an ideal pawn in disastrous plans.

Mosley's portrayal of L.A.'s mid-20th-century racial divide is far from simplistic, with winners and sinners on both sides. He also does a better-than-usual job here of plot pacing, with less need to rush a solution at the end. But it is Easy Rawlins's evolution that's most intriguing in Brawly Brown. A man determined to curb his violent and distrustful tendencies, Easy finds himself, at 44, having finally come to peace with his life, just when the peace around him is at such tremendous risk. --J. Kingston Pierce


From Publishers Weekly
Finally. Five years after the last taste (1997's Gone Fishin') and six years after the last full meal (1996's A Little Yellow Dog), Easy Rawlins makes a very welcome return. Now 44 years old, Easy no longer makes a living from doing people "favors." Now he owns a house, works for the Board of Education in Los Angeles and is father to a teenage son, Jesus, and a young daughter, Feather. It's 1964, and while some things have changed, the process is slow and uncertain. Too slow for some, including Brawly Brown, the son of Alva, the girlfriend of Easy's friend, John. Hotheaded Brawly has become involved with a group calling itself the Urban Revolutionary Party, and John and Alva fear the group's unspoken aim is violence and revenge. Friendship and loyalty being still sacred to Easy, he agrees, as a favor, to try to locate and talk to Brawly. As usual, Easy's path is not easy. When a body surfaces, Easy finds himself in the middle of a vicious puzzle where lives are cheap and death the easiest solution. As always, Mosley illuminates time and place with a precision few writers can match whatever genre they choose. He also delivers a rousing good story and continues to captivate with characters readers have grown to love, including the now "dead" Mouse, who still plays an important role in Easy's chronicle.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins has accomplished many of his goals through hard work and perseverance, and in spite of being a black man in a white-dominated world. When Alva Torres needs help to locate her son, Brawly, Easy gladly steps in as unofficial private eye. The young man turns out to be mixed up with a radical political group, and Easy tries to find a way to ease Brawly and himself out of the mess. After two men are murdered and the police search for everyone with a connection to either death, Easy comes up with a violent answer that saves Brawly's life and covers his own tracks. Mosley weaves together the racial tensions felt in 1964 Los Angeles with the complex threads of Easy's life. Rawlins's multilayered personality and history provide the character's mental and physical drive, which in turn drives the plot. Supporting characters bring their own depth and substance and give readers additional insight into the period. A fine balance of historical fiction, murder mystery, and character study, this novel offers action and a lot of thoughtful material.Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VACopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
After a long wait, Easy Rawlins is back. Now it's February 1964, and the winds of racial unrest begin to blow in west Los Angeles. Easy has settled into a calm life balancing family and job responsibilities but remains troubled by regrets surrounding the death of his friend Mouse. Then a friend asks Easy to do one of his "favors": find and bring home the young, hot-headed Brawly Brown, believed to be caught up in a black activist organization, the Urban Revolutionary Party. But the situation is not so easy, Easy finds, as he and Brawly are entangled in murder, gun-running, robbery, and betrayal. The action is well paced and plausible; Mosley's sense of time and place are near-perfect, as usual, and M.E. Willis's first-person narration nicely conveys our streetwise and world-weary hero. Highly recommended.Kristen L. Smith, Loras Coll. Lib., Dubuque, IA Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
In this Easy Rawlins novel, Easy does a favor for a friend, offering to track down errant son Brawly Brown and get him out of trouble. Rawlins's efforts lead him through a racially divided 1960s Los Angeles neighborhood and into the lives of black revolutionaries. M.E. Willis portrays Rawlins as he struggles with solving a mystery, raising two children in troubled times, managing a myriad of friendships, and holding down a respectable job. Both Mosley and Willis have the pace nailed, with the tale unwinding and wrapping up at a smooth speed. For Easy fans, it's a good ride with an old friend. For new fans, it's a great ride through the streets of L.A. H.L.S. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Mosley fans have been eagerly anticipating the return of Easy Rawlins, last seen in A Little Yellow Dog (1995) trying unsuccessfully to carve a separate peace for himself away from the violence of South Central L.A. in the mid-60s. That's the situation again, as Rawlins is once more lured back into the street life when a friend needs help. Teenager Brawly Brown has left home and is running with the radical Urban Revolutionary Party. Easy quickly finds the boy, but he is just as quickly caught up in the murder of one of the party's leaders. There is a poignant world-weariness to Rawlins here. He responds to "the gruff bark of the American Negro's soul," yet he also sees Brawly as part of an "army of young fools . . . fighting and dying for ideas they barely understand, for rights they never possessed, for beliefs based on lies." This episode replays the themes and recaptures the mood of the previous installment more than we've come to expect from the constantly evolving Rawlins series, but it nevertheless stands on its own as a powerful human drama and a vividly re-created historical moment . Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Walter Mosley returns to the the turbulent, conflicted energies of 1960s Los Angeles with an Easy Rawlins mystery that's a direct sequel to his 1995 A Little Yellow Dog.

Asked for a favor by his longtime friend John, Easy hits the streets to make the kind of moves only he knows how to make. He's looking for John's stepson, Brawly Brown, a youthful giant who's mixed up with a radical black-power group, the Urban Revolutionary Party. Easy has barely started on his hunt when he discovers the corpse of Brawly's father and finds himself entangled in murder, politics, and a secret police spy network that monitors black extremists. Along with these troubles, Easy suffers from bouts of guilt involving the death of his best friend, the stone killer Mouse -- who, it turns out, may still be alive.

Mosley emphasizes sentiment and thoroughly details black culture, underscoring a harsh existence with scenes of abrupt violence. He remains in excellent form, conveying raw emotion through the medium of a taut plot. As always with his writing, the highest points come when he deals with the intricacy of race relations or the conflicted nature of his ever-evolving, most popular character: Easy has spent his life fighting to escape poverty and bloodshed, but even as he achieves his middle-class dreams he's perpetually drawn back to the terrors of the ghetto. The contradictions of such a man are matched by the complexity of the tumultuous L.A. landscape, and those emotional and historical resonances keep readers deeply engaged in the story.

With Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Walter Mosley again proves that his greatest ability is to fully realize the distressing but commonplace nature of despair, remorse, brutality, and the beauty found even in the fiercest of lives. This is yet another gripping and poignant work from one of America's most talented authors. (Tom Piccirilli)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Easy Rawlins is out of the investigation business and as far away from crime as a black man can be in 1960s Los Angeles. But living around desperate men means life gets complicated sometimes. When an old friend gets in enough trouble to ask for Easy's help, he finds he can't refuse.Young Brawly Brown has traded in his family for The Clan of the First Men, a group rejecting white leadership and laws. Brown's mom asks Easy to make sure her baby's okay, and Easy promises to find him. His first day on the case, Easy comes face-to-face with a corpse, and before he knows it he is a murder suspect and in the middle of a police raid. Brawly Brown is clearly the kind of trouble most folks try to avoid. It takes everything Easy has just to stay alive as he explores a world filled with betrayals and predators like he never imagined. Big Boy Brawly Brown is the masterful crime novel that Walter Mosley's legions of fans have been waiting for. This book marks the return of a master at the top of his form.

Author Biography: Walter Mosley is the author of the acclaimed Easy Rawlins series, the novels Fearless Jones, Blue Light and RL's Dream, and two collections of stories Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, for which he received the Anisfield-Wold Award. He was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine - Don McLeese

Ending a seven-year break from Easy Rawlins, Mosley resumes the popular series by plunging his streetwise hero into the political turbulence of 1960s Los Angeles, involving him with a group of radical black militants who might be even less trustworthy than the cops. The plot pivots around Brawly Brown, a twenty-three-year-old hothead who has forsaken his troubled family to join the Urban Revolutionary Party. Since Brawly's estranged mother is the lover of one of Easy's close friends, Easy takes time away from his day job as a school custodian to determine whether these armed insurrectionists are radical idealists or a street gang operating on the fringes of organized crime. Complicating his investigation are Brawly's romantic entanglements, which Easy finds almost as tough to sort out as the group's political factions. While Easy Rawlins remains one of the more compelling protagonists in contemporary crime fiction, he accurately describes this novel's predicament as "a puzzle with too many pieces." Whereas Mosley's previous work has been more character-driven, here he gives the reader too much plot, too many characters and too little reason to care.

Publishers Weekly

Finally. Five years after the last taste (1997's Gone Fishin') and six years after the last full meal (1996's A Little Yellow Dog), Easy Rawlins makes a very welcome return. Now 44 years old, Easy no longer makes a living from doing people "favors." Now he owns a house, works for the Board of Education in Los Angeles and is father to a teenage son, Jesus, and a young daughter, Feather. It's 1964, and while some things have changed, the process is slow and uncertain. Too slow for some, including Brawly Brown, the son of Alva, the girlfriend of Easy's friend, John. Hotheaded Brawly has become involved with a group calling itself the Urban Revolutionary Party, and John and Alva fear the group's unspoken aim is violence and revenge. Friendship and loyalty being still sacred to Easy, he agrees, as a favor, to try to locate and talk to Brawly. As usual, Easy's path is not easy. When a body surfaces, Easy finds himself in the middle of a vicious puzzle where lives are cheap and death the easiest solution. As always, Mosley illuminates time and place with a precision few writers can match whatever genre they choose. He also delivers a rousing good story and continues to captivate with characters readers have grown to love, including the now "dead" Mouse, who still plays an important role in Easy's chronicle. Agent, Gloria Loomis. (One-day laydown July 2) Forecast: This one should shoot up bestseller lists, backed by a 10-city author tour and a major advertising and publicity campaign. The reissue and repackaging of six Easy Rawlins novels this fall, each with an original stand-alone story focusing on the fate of Easy's friend Mouse, will keep the momentum going. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This latest outing in Mosley's ongoing detective series (Devil in a Blue Dress) could be subtitled Easy Rawlins's Family Values, as the concept of family whether the one you are born into or the one you choose for yourself echoes throughout. Set in 1964, the core of the plot finds Easy on a mission to lure the title character back to his mother. But not only is Brawley bad, he's big and not so easily swayed, especially since joining the Urban Revolutionary Party, a political group wary of strangers. Add to that a cache of stolen guns, secret government investigators, a payroll heist, several murders, problems with his son, and everybody lying about everything, plus his own crushing guilt over the apparent death of his best friend, and you've got Easy behind the eight ball once again. The author continues to probe the African American experience, and while a crime is at the heart of this book, its soul lies in deeper issues. Nonetheless, Mosley is always a good read. Recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/02.] Michael Rogers, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins has accomplished many of his goals through hard work and perseverance, and in spite of being a black man in a white-dominated world. When Alva Torres needs help to locate her son, Brawly, Easy gladly steps in as unofficial private eye. The young man turns out to be mixed up with a radical political group, and Easy tries to find a way to ease Brawly and himself out of the mess. After two men are murdered and the police search for everyone with a connection to either death, Easy comes up with a violent answer that saves Brawly's life and covers his own tracks. Mosley weaves together the racial tensions felt in 1964 Los Angeles with the complex threads of Easy's life. Rawlins's multilayered personality and history provide the character's mental and physical drive, which in turn drives the plot. Supporting characters bring their own depth and substance and give readers additional insight into the period. A fine balance of historical fiction, murder mystery, and character study, this novel offers action and a lot of thoughtful material.-Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews