Mystery authors continue series with new titles

Authors Walter Mosley and Michael Connelly have each selected Los Angeles as the city of choice for their fictional detectives. Mosley's Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins and Connelly's Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch rank among the most popular heroes in mystery fiction, and Mosley and Connelly's latest books feature them tackling their toughest cases.

Mosley brings his Rawlins character into the mid-'60s with Little Scarlet (Little, Brown & Company), while Connelly puts Bosch into a bewildering present-day situation that includes both police and FBI involvement in The Narrows (Little, Brown). But while Rawlins, an unlicensed private eye, operates outside the law, Bosch is a former detective who feels bound to honor and respect procedure even though he's no longer officially on the job.

Little Scarlet begins just as the 1965 Watts Riots in South Central Los Angeles have concluded with the community where Rawlins resides in turmoil. He's recruited unofficially by the LAPD to solve a heinous crime they are afraid to investigate because a predominantly white force can't find anyone in South Central L.A. willing to talk to them. While Rawlins is also angry at what has happened and resentful of the police, he still wants to find out who killed a young black woman with no ties to anything happening in Watts. But once he begins probing, Rawlins discovers that the main suspect in the case is innocent, and that he's stumbled into a serial murder case with major racial and political implications.

In his new novel, Mosley includes such familiar faces as longtime Rawlins sidekicks Jewelle Jackson, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, Etta Mae, and Jackson Blue, plus new names like Paris Minton, the bookstore owner from his Fearless Jones novels, and rumpled detective Melvin Suggs, one of the few cops he trusts. Mosley uses the storyline to discuss changes in attitude and direction among African-Americans during the '60s, depicting the emerging militancy, pride and awareness of heritage and culture that were the byproducts of the era's Civil Rights movement. Still, he doesn't neglect the book's major themes, nor deliver a clich