NCW Libraries

Devil in a Blue Dress, a defining novel in Walter Mosley's bestselling Easy Rawlins mystery series, was adapted into a TriStar Pictures film starring Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins and Don Cheadle as Mouse.
Set in the late 1940s, in the African-American community of Watts, Los Angeles, Devil in a Blue Dress follows Easy Rawlins, a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's...

"Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender has a rule about never taking a job that pays too well--in the criminal underworld, if someone is offering you more money than a job is worth, someone is going to end up dead. But he's bending his rule this one time because he and his girlfriend, Ronnie, are in desperate need of cash so they can hire a top-notch kidnapper to snatch Ronnie's two-year-old son back from her evil ex. The whole thing is pretty complicated,...

Easy Rawlins is in need of money for his daughter Feather's expensive medical treatment, so he agrees to find a missing attorney who seems to be more trouble than he's worth.

Easy Rawlin's search for a stunning beauty takes him into America's racial dilemmas of the early '60s and the mysteries of the human character.

Philip Marlowe takes on a case involving a Pasadena widow, a missing daughter-in-law, and a stolen gold coin.

Elvis Cole's taciturn partner, Joe Pike, investigates an attack on former associate Frank Meyer, a one-time mercenary whose family has been murdered by a professional hit crew and who police suspect has been keeping a dangerous secret.

"Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender is in the middle of burgling a house and has just gotten his hands on one of the world's rarest stamps when the job goes terrifically wrong. After barely escaping, Junior realizes the danger is far from over. He's gotten himself on the wrong side of a man whose name is synonymous with violence, and to save his own skin he's set off a chain reaction of blackmail, strong-arming, and escalating crime. To pay off his...

Bradley Warren had lost something very valuable, something that belonged to someone else: a rare thirteenth century Japanese manuscript called the Hagakure. Everything PI Elvis Cole knew about Japanese culture he'd learned from reading Shogun, but he knew a lot of crooks and what he didn't know, his sociopathic sidekick Joe Pike did. Together their search begins in LA's Little Tokyo and the nest of the notorious Japanese mafia, the Yakuza, and leads...

Los Angeles PI Elvis Cole is hired by three children who want to make sure their father, Clark Hewitt, is still alive. Hewitt went into hiding, pursued by Russian counterfeiters on whom he squealed. The investigation takes Elvis to Hewitt's hometown, Seattle, where he runs afoul of both the newly emerging Russian Mafia and U.S. Federal Marshals.

Overview: The police don't show up on Easy Rawlins's doorstep until the third girl dies. It's Los Angeles, 1956, and it takes more than one murdered black girl before the cops get interested. Now they need Easy. As he says: " I was worth a precinct full of detectives when the cops needed the word in the ghetto." But Easy turns them down. He's married now, a father - and his detective days are over. Then a white college coed dies the same brutal death,...