The plot explodes after Luz kicks her habit, cleans out her husband’s safe, shoots her bodyguards and heads for the border “like a woman on fire.” Even for a skilled smuggler like Malone, this is a treacherous journey because el Príncipe has put a ruthless killer, Jerónimo Cruz (street name: el Apache), on their trail. The story hangs on the entwined fortunes of Rolando, a Tijuana crime boss respectfully known as el Príncipe his drug-addled wife, Luz and Kevin Malone, an American drifter who drives illegals across the Mexican border.

Every character in Richard Lange’s ANGEL BABY (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) feels like flesh and bone, even the ones who show up just to be killed. When you find yourself rooting for the killer in a grisly crime novel, you know you’re in the hands of a real writer. Easy and Mouse originally burst into this series with guns blazing but while they still talk the talk, they’ve mellowed since the old days, and Easy has completed his transformation from tough guy to knight errant.

The bloody laundry bag of cash the boy has somehow acquired proves a smart way to take the narrative into criminal territory, introducing unsavory characters who can shoulder the plot’s antisocial behavioral burdens, like shooting people. His descriptions of the crash pad where Ruby took Evander during an acid trip are as vivid as any true-life memoir. Mosley is never better than when he’s got a juicy cut of history to chew on, and the hippie counterculture of the late ’60s perfectly feeds his style.

Death being just another wobbly notion in this series, Mosley’s clearly immortal sleuth emerges from his near-fatal coma and is soon off on a new case.Īt the urging of his best friend, the violence-prone Raymond (Mouse) Alexander, Easy agrees to search for Evander Noon, known as Little Green, a young black man who wandered up to the Sunset Strip “to see what all the hippies looked like” and went off with a white girl named Ruby. So it’s still 1967 when LITTLE GREEN (Doubleday, $25.95) opens, and only two months since Easy’s accident.

It’s been six years since Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins drove off a cliff in “Blonde Faith.” But time is a flexible concept in the mysteries Walter Mosley writes about a black private eye who works irregular cases in his own neighborhood of Watts and throughout Los Angeles.

Little Green by Walter Mosley