Mosley's first Easy Rawlins mystery (and first novel) is drenched in the details and sensibilities of its period setting - 1948 Los Angeles (Watts & environs). You can almost smell the heat and sweat in the dive bars, cramped apartments, clapboard houses, and LAPD interrogation rooms where a young, traumatized and wary WWII vet - Easy Rawlins – agrees to some quick cash in exchange for some amateur detective work. Within hours he becomes more and more deeply entangled in a web of lies, jilted lovers, stolen cash, murder, and a pedophilic politician.
Mosley introduces a large cast of characters – maybe too large for this modest novel, and it becomes confusing to remember characters in who reappear in the middle of the novel who were briefly introduced in the first couple of chapters.
But while now we know that Devil in a Blue Dress promises much more and better things to come (in the next 30+ books by Mosley)…it’s an auspicious start and a good read on its own terms.