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Summary
Summary
The Walter Mosley and his new hero, Leonid McGill, are back in the new New York Times -bestselling mystery series that's already being hailed as a classic of contemporary noir.
Leonid McGill--the protagonist introduced in The Long Fall , the book that returned Walter Mosley to bestseller lists nationwide--is still fighting to stick to his reformed ways while the world around him pulls him in every other direction. He has split up with his girlfriend, Aura, because his new self won't let him leave his wife--but then Aura's new boyfriend starts angling to get Leonid kicked out of his prime, top-of-theskyscraper office space. Meanwhile, one of his sons seems to have found true love--but the girl has a shady past that's all of a sudden threatening the whole McGill family--and his other son, the charming rogue Twilliam, is doing nothing but enabling the crisis.
Most ominously of all, Alfonse Rinaldo, the mysterious power-behind-the-throne at City Hall, the fixer who seems to control every little thing that happens in New York City, has a problem that even he can't fix--and he's come to Leonid for help. It seems a young woman has disappeared, leaving murder in her wake, and it means everything to Rinaldo to track her down. But he won't tell McGill his motives, which doesn't quite square with the new company policy--but turning down Rinaldo is almost impossible to even contemplate.
Known to Evil delivers on all the promise of the characters and story lines introduced in The Long Fall , and then some. It careens fast and deep into gritty, glittery contemporary Manhattan, making the city pulse in a whole new way, and it firmly establishes Leonid McGill as one of the mystery world's most iconic, charismatic leading men.
Author Notes
Walter Mosley was born in Los Angeles, California on January 12, 1952. He graduated from Johnson State College in Vermont. His first book, Devil in a Blue Dress, was published in 1990, won a John Creasy Award for best first novel, and was made into a motion picture starring Denzel Washington in 1995. He is the author of the Easy Rawlins Mystery series, the Leonid McGill Mystery series, and the Fearless Jones series. His other works include Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, 47, Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, and Twelve Steps toward Political Revelation. He has received numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award, and PEN America's Lifetime Achievement Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Mosley scores a clean knockout in his excellent second mystery featuring New York City PI Leonid McGill (after 2009's The Long Fall). Still striving to atone for some of the lives he's ruined, the 54-year-old McGill laments that there are "no straight lines in the life or labors of the private detective." Instead, crises crowd him at every turn. A powerful, shadowy city hall official wants McGill to locate and protect a young woman named Tara Lear, a task complicated by a murder. Older son Dimitri is involved with a Russian hooker whose pimp doesn't want to let her go. Younger son Twill, trying to help his brother, risks violating parole restrictions. Relations with wife Katrina and lover Aura Ullman, "with her Aryan eyes and Ethiopian skin," are in flux. The ex-boxer has an eclectic group in his corner, including computer whiz Tiny "Bug" Bateman, but McGill is the one taking the blows and meting out punishment in this contemporary noir gem. Author tour. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Leonid McGill, Mosley's newest hero (The Long Fall, 2009), is haunted by the bad things he used to do to people or so he keeps telling us. At first, the plot seems to support that claim: as McGill works his case, tracking a young woman for a powerful fixer, he is also consumed with helping a former victim, rescuing his son's girlfriend from her pimp, and remaining respectful in his loveless marriage. But those plotlines are decoys because the supporting characters aren't fully developed. Each exists to demonstrate something about McGill his remorse, violence, loyalty and then is quickly whisked offstage. Mosley has written some classic crime novels, and he has a devoted following, but the strikingly different setting of this series doesn't hide a glaring flaw: from start to finish, McGill and his supporting cast don't change. This is a very interior, solipsistic crime novel, and McGill's first-person narration may feel oppressive to some readers. Others may wonder how such a self-centered sleuth could possibly become a good judge of other people's characters. In marked contrast to Mosley's threadbare L.A. settings, McGill's world is lush and wealthy. But it's also cartoonish in its absolutes: McGill knows no fear but constructs spy-worthy escape hatches. He has an extensive network of criminals and stone-cold killers. He's short and ugly, but women throw themselves at him. All writing requires some degree of world-building, but the world Mosley has built here shows the marks of its invention.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
How do domestic abuse and chronic alcoholism drive entire neighborhoods to ruin? How can drug trafficking and ethnic violence transform a vast public housing complex into a war zone? These are the sorts of questions raised by the gutsy Scottish writer Denise Mina in two series of sociologically freighted novels set in Glasgow. Each comes with its own locally born and bred (and nearly broken) female protagonist, one a social worker and the other a reporter, who approach crime by going to the root of it and asking how a civilized society can allow such injustice to flourish. STILL MIDNIGHT (Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown, $24.99) opens a third series in the same vein, challenging us to reflect on how a violent act can unravel even the most close-knit family. Terror grips the household of a shopkeeper named Aamir Anwar when two masked gunmen burst into the family's modest home clamoring for "Bob," a name that means nothing to anyone. In their frustration, the bumbling pair make off with the patriarch after accidentally shooting his daughter, leaving the others wondering how to come up with a £2 million ransom. Alex Morrow, a detective sergeant with the Strathclyde police force, is another of Mina's prickly heroines, the kind you love at your own risk. Burdened with personal tragedy and embattled by class and gender politics, Morrow is abrasive, ill-mannered and tough to like. She's also the smartest cop in the shop, the only one sensitive enough to interpret the subtle vagaries of human behavior. It's a huge pleasure to watch her crack the "family myths and fables" that blood relatives instinctively adopt as protection from outsiders - and as a way of preserving themselves from members of their own clan. Mina makes a great deal of the racial prejudices that poison community police work, but her grimly funny plot really turns on the eccentricities of her unpredictable characters. If you don't count his newborn grandchild, Aamir is the only true innocent here, a tidy little man whose mania for cleanliness and order is his way of keeping chaos at bay. The amateur villains of this tragicomic piece are drawn with the same wry compassion and bleak humor, even the clumsy idiot who is so startled by the beauty of Aamir's teenage daughter that he shoots her. However this family pulls together after these bizarre misadventures, the safe and orderly world Aamir built to protect it will never be the same. The voice of the narrator - low, intense and soaked in melancholy - is what hooks us in KNOWN TO EVIL (Riverhead, $25.95), the second mystery by Walter Mosley to feature Leonid McGill, an exboxer and onetime fixer for the mob. "I gave up my dirty tricks with the intention of doing the right thing in my business and my life," McGill tells us in a world-weary tone that's music to our ears. "But that never changed my brawling style." This reformed bad boy currently works out of an Art Deco Manhattan office building as a private eye, but it's hard to make amends to society when most of your clients and contacts have underworld connections. Harder still when the wife you don't love, the lover who left you, and two criminally inclined children are creating constant distractions. McGill's shady past comes back to bite him when he does a favor for a power broker he refers to as "the Big Man" by keeping an eye on a young woman of blameless reputation. When the P.I. arrives on her doorstep, the place is crawling with cops, and before he knows it, McGill is mixed up in a murder. Mosley uses his plot like clothesline, stringing up scenes that barely touch but look great flapping in the wind. His characters are something else, though. Like McGill, they live and breathe genre lingo, even when they're just talking with their fists. Philip Kerr transports us to Nazi Germany in 1934 in IF THE DEAD RISE NOT (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), a solid addition to the great crime novels that make up the Berlin Noir trilogy and, like them, strategically positioned on the margins of World War II. Bernie Gunther, the maverick homicide cop who bolted the force during the political purges of 1933, is installed as a house detective at a fashionable hotel, dealing with petty thefts and keeping an eye out for "joy girls." Yet this dull job turns deadly when Bernie is caught up in the German Olympic Organizing Committee's machinations to forestall an American boycott of the 1936 Olympiad by covering up its systematic exclusion of Jews from German sports clubs. Leaving the intrigue to the flashy guys in espionage novels, Bernie arms himself with a strong right hook and a tough-guy line of patter to make it out of this one alive. That well-bred voice cursing a blue streak in INVISIBLE BOY (Grand Central, $24.99) can belong only to Madeline Dare, the renegade socialite from Oyster Bay, Long Island, who solves murders and spits venom in Cornelia Read's offbeat mysteries, it's the early 1990s and Madeline is living in Chelsea and working part time taking phone orders for a publisher when her cousin Cate talks her into helping to restore an abandoned family cemetery in Queens. Madeline is so distressed when she discovers a child's skeleton in the underbrush that she attaches herself to the police investigation. Although Read gives her heroine a strong personal motive for delving into this sad case, the soulsearching and hand-wringing get a bit maudlin. We're ever so much happier when Madeline takes a break from her quest to talk trash with her foul-mouthed friends. Denise Mina's latest novel challenges us to reflect on how a violent act can unravel even a close-knit family.
Kirkus Review
An offer he can't refuse leads Leonid McGill (The Long Fall, 2009, etc.) on a grim tour that takes him from New York's executive suites to its lowest dives. Alphonse Rinaldo, special assistant to the City of New York, wants information he can't be seen to want. He needs discreet inquiries made about Angelique Tara Lear so that he can rest assured that she's doing all right. Through his legman, Sam Strange, he engages soiled ex-fixer McGill for the job, and a bevy of police cars around Angie's building instantly informs McGill that she's not a bit all right. FIT student/cocktail waitress Wanda Soa has been shot to death inside Angie's apartment, presumably by the unknown heavy who was fatally stabbed around the same time. The discovery launches McGill into a free-wheeling investigation in which he bounces like a pinball from high-priced lawyers to building supers to sex-slavers, all the while pretending to more identities than can be found in the Manhattan phone directory. His inquiries are frequently interrupted by his continued struggles to rescue Ron Sharkey, a businessman he'd framed years ago, from the dire consequences of his years in prison, and his frazzled attempts to deal with his unfaithful wife and wayward sons, who make his domestic life just as chaotic as his professional life. This time, however, these sidelights provide ballast for a case whose complications are so labyrinthine that you'll need a score card to keep track of the suspects, motives and incidental felonies. A rich collection of individual scenes and people as memorable as the tangled plot is forgettable. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
It would be easy-but ill advised-to overlook Leonid McGill, a short, stocky, bald, middle-aged black man with a worried expression. At any given New York minute, though, McGill just might explode in your face or end up dead at your feet. He and his beautiful Scandinavian wife of 23 years have three children and an "arrangement"; he's trained himself to appreciate that one of the kids is actually his own. Still trying to shake off his past ties to crime, McGill works as a PI, mainly on the right side of the law. Fingered by an NYC power broker to investigate a woman, he arrives at her apartment to find it overrun by cops. Someone there has been shot and her assailant stabbed to death. It's enough to test even this dark knight's commitment to righting wrongs. Verdict With his second McGill outing (after The Long Fall), the neo-noir master proves that this new series has legs; this title will appeal to anybody who enjoys George Pelecanos's take on contemporary DC as well as longtime Easy Rawlins fans. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/09.]-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Don't you like the food?" Katrina, my wife of twenty- three years, asked. "It's delicious," I said. "Whatever you make is always great." In the corner there sat a walnut cabinet that used to contain our first stereo record player. Now it held Katrina's cherished Blue Danube china collection, which she inherited from her favorite aunt, Bergit. On top of the chest was an old quart pickle jar-- the makeshift vase for an arrangement of tiny wildflowers of every color from scarlet to cornflower blue to white. "But you're frowning," my beautiful Scandinavian wife said. "What were you thinking about?" I looked up from the filet mignon and Gorgonzola blue cheese salad to gaze at the flowers. My thoughts were not the kind of dinner conversation one had with one's wife and family. I have a boyfriend now, Aura Ullman had told me that morning. I wanted to tell you. I didn't want to feel like I'm hiding anything from you. "Where'd you get those flowers, Mom?" Shelly asked. His name is George, Aura told me, the sad empathy in the words making its way to her face. I had no reason to be jealous. Aura and I had been lovers over the eight months Katrina abandoned me for the investment banker Andre Zool. I loved Aura but gave her up because when Katrina came back, after Andre was indicted for fraud, I felt that she, Katrina, was my sentence for the wrong I had done in a long life of crime. "I saw them at the deli and thought they might brighten up our dinner," Katrina told her daughter. Shelly had been trying to forgive her mother for leaving me. She was a sophomore at CCNY and another man's daughter, though she didn't know it. Two of my children were fathered out of wedlock; only the eldest, sour and taciturn Dimitri, who always sat as far away from me as possible, was of my blood. Do you love him? I hadn't meant to ask Aura that. I didn't want to know the answer or to show vulnerability. He's very good company . . . and I get lonely. "Well?" Katrina asked. Something about those flowers and the echo of Aura's voice in my mind made me want to curse, or maybe to slam my fist down on the plate. "Hey, everybody," Twill said. He was standing in the doorway to the dining room; dark and slender, handsome and flawless except for a small crescent scar on his chin. "You're late," Katrina scolded my favorite. "You know it, Moms," the seventeen- year- old man replied. "I'm lucky to get home at all with everything I got to do. My PO got me workin' this after- school job at the supermarket. Says it'll keep me outta trouble." "He's not a parole officer. He's a juvenile offender social worker," I said. Just seeing Twill brought levity into the room. "It's not a he," Twill said as he slid into the chair next to me. "Ms. Melinda Tarris says that she wants me workin' three afternoons a week." "And she's right, too," I added. "You need something to occupy your mind and keep you out of trouble." "It's not people like me that get in trouble, Pops," Twill sang. "I talk so much and know so many people that I can't get away with nuthin' somebody don't see it. It's the quiet ones that get in the most trouble. Ain't that right, Bulldog?" "Can't you be quiet sometimes?" dour Dimitri said. Twill's pet name for his older brother was an apt one. Like me Dimitri was short and big- boned, powerful even though he rarely exercised. His skin was not quite as dark brown as mine but you could see me in every part of him. I wondered why he was so angry at his brother's chiding. Even though Dimitri never liked me much he loved his siblings. And he had a special bond with Twill, who was so outgoing all he had to do was sit down in a room for five minutes and a party was likely to break out. "Leonid." "Yes, Katrina?" "Are you all right?" Even though we'd drifted apart like the continents had-- long ago-- Katrina could still read my moods. We had a kind of subterranean connection that allowed my wife to see, at least partly, into my state of mind. It wasn't just Aura's decision to move on that bothered me. It was my life at that table, Dimitri's uncharacteristic anger at his brother, and even those delicate flowers sitting where I had never seen a bouquet before. There was a feeling at the back of my mind, something that was burgeoning into consciousness like a vibrating moth pressing out from its cocoon. The phone rang and Katrina started. When I looked into her gray- blue eyes some kind of wordless knowledge seemed to pass between us. "I'll get it," Shelly shouted. She hurried from the room into the hall, where the cordless unit sat on its ledge. Katrina smiled at me. Even this made me wonder. She'd been back home for nearly a year. In that time her smile had been tentative, contrite. She wanted me to know that she was there for the long run, that she was sorry for her transgressions and wanted to make our life together work. But that evening her smile was confident. Even the way she sat was regal and self- assured. "Dad, it's for you." Standing up from my chair and moving into the hallway, I felt as if I were displaced, another man, or maybe the same man in a similar but vastly different world: the working- poor lottery winner who suddenly one day realizes that riches have turned his blood to vinegar. "Hello?" I said into the receiver. I was expecting an acquaintance or maybe a credit- card company asking about a suspect charge. No one who I did business with had my home number. The kind of business I was in couldn't be addressed by an innocent. "Leonid," a man's voice said, "this is Sam Strange." "Why are you calling me at my home?" I asked, because though Strange was the legman for Alphonse Rinaldo, one of the secret pillars of New York's political and economic systems, I couldn't allow even him to infringe on my domestic life, such as it was. "The Big Man called and said it was an emergency," Strange said. Sam worked for the seemingly self- appointed Special Assistant to the City of New York. I say seemingly, because even though Alphonse Rinaldo was definitely attached to City Hall, no one knew his job description or the extent of his power. I had done a few questionable jobs for the man before I decided to go straight. And while I was no longer engaging in criminal activities I couldn't afford to turn him down without a hearing. "What is it you want?" I asked. "There's a young woman named Tara Lear that he wants you to make contact with." Sam rarely, if ever, spoke Rinaldo's name. He had an internal censor like those of old- time printers who replaced "God" with " G- d" in books. "Why?" "He just wants you to speak to her and to make sure everything's all right. He told me to tell you that he would consider this a great favor." Being able to do a favor for Special Assistant Rinaldo was like winning six lotteries rolled into one. My blood might turn into high- octane rocket fuel if I wasn't careful. Not for the first time I wondered if I would ever get out from under my iniquitous past. "Leonid," Sam Strange said. "When am I supposed to find this young woman?" "Now . . . tonight. And you don't have to find her, I can tell you exactly where she is." "If you know where she is why don't you just tell him and he can go talk to her himself?" "This is the way he wants it." "Why don't you go?" I asked. "He wants you, Leonid." I heard Twill say something in the dining room but couldn't make out the words. His mother and Shelly laughed. "Leonid," Sam Strange said again. "Right now?" "Immediately." "You know I'm trying to be aboveboard nowadays, Sam." "He's just asking you to go and speak to this Lear woman. To make sure that she's all right. There's nothing illegal about that." "And I'm supposed to tell her that Mr. Rinaldo is concerned about her but can't come himself?" "Do not mention his name or refer to him in any way. The meeting should be casual. She shouldn't have any idea that you're a detective or that you're working for someone looking after her welfare." "Why not?" "You know the drill," Strange said, trying to enforce his personal sense of hierarchy on me. "Orders come down and we do as we're told." "No," I said. "That's you. You do what you're told. Me-- I got ground rules." "And what are they?" "First," I said, "I will not put this Tara's physical or mental well- being into jeopardy. Second, I will only report on her state of mind and security. I will not convey information that might make her vulnerable to you or your boss. And, finally, I will not be a party to making her do anything against her will or whim." "That's not how it works and you know it," Sam said. "Then go on down to the next name on the list and don't ever call this number again." "There is no other name." "If you want me you got to play by my rules." "I'll have to report this conversation." "Of course you do." "He won't like it." "I'll make a note of that." He gave me an address on West Sixtieth and an apartment number. "I'll be staying at the Oxford Arms Club on Eighty- fourth until this situation is resolved," he said. "You can call me there anytime, day or night." I hung up. There was no reason to continue the conversation, or to wish him well, for that matter. I never liked the green- eyed agent of the city's Special Assistant. Alphonse had two conduits to the outside world. Sam was the errand boy. Christian Latour, who sat in the chamber outside Alphonse's office, was the Big Man's gatekeeper and crystal ball combined. I liked Christian, even though he had no use for me. I stood there in the hall, trying to connect the past fifteen minutes. Dimitri's uncharacteristic barking at his brother and their mother's newfound confidence, the crude vase and its lovely flowers, and, of course, the memory of Aura in her heartfelt concern and almost callous betrayal. I went to the closet in our bedroom, looking to find one of my three identical dark- blue suits. The first thing I noticed was that the clothes had been rearranged. I didn't know exactly what had been where before, but things were neater and imposed- upon with some kind of strict order. My suits were nowhere in sight. "What are you doing?" Katrina asked from the doorway. "Looking for my blue suit." "I sent two of your blue suits to the cleaners. You haven't had them cleaned in a month." "What am I supposed to wear?" I said, turning to face her. Sometimes when Katrina smiled I remembered falling in love with her. It lasted long enough to get married and make Dimitri. After that things went sour. We never had sex and rarely even kissed anymore. "You have the ochre one," she said. "Where's the one I wore home tonight?" "In the hamper. The lapels were all spotted. Wear the ochre one." "I hate that suit." "Then why did you buy it?" "You bought it for me." "You tried it on. You paid the bill." I yanked the suit out of the closet. "Where are you going?" she asked. "It's a job. I have to go interview somebody for a client." "I thought you didn't take business calls on our home phone." "Yeah," I said, taking off my sweatpants. "Leonid." "What, Katrina?" "We have to talk." I continued undressing. "The last time you said that I didn't see you for eight months," I said. "We have to talk about us." "Can it wait till later or will you be gone when I get home?" "It's nothing like that," she said. "I've noticed how distant you've been and I want to, to connect with you." "Yeah. Sure. Let me go take care of this thing and either we'll talk when I get back, or tomorrow at the latest. Okay?" She smiled and kissed my cheek tenderly. She had to lean over a bit because I'm two inches shorter than she. I put on the dark- yellow suit and a white dress shirt. Since I was going out for such an important client I even cinched a burgundy tie around my neck. The man in the mirror looked to me like a bald, black- headed, fat grub that had spent the afternoon drying in the sun. I was shorter than most men, and if you didn't see me naked you might have thought I was portly. But my size was from bone structure and muscles developed over nearly four decades working out at Gordo's Boxing Gym. "Hey Dad, " Twill called as I was going out the front door of our eleventh- floor prewar apartment. "Yeah, son?" I said on a sigh. "Mardi Bitterman's back in town. Her and her sister." Mardi was a year older than Twill. She and her sister had been molested by their father and I had to intervene when Twill got it in his head to murder the man. "I thought they had moved to their mother's family in Ireland." "Turns out that they weren't related," Twill said. "Her father bought Mardi from some pervert. Her sister, too. I don't know the whole story but they had to come home." "Okay. So what do you want from me?" I was impatient, even with Twill. Maybe the fact that his relationship to me was the same as Mardi to her father cut at me a little. "Mardi's taking care of her sister and she needs a job. She's eighteen and on her own, you know." "So?" "You're always sayin' how much you want a receptionist. I figured this would be a good time for you to have one. You know, Mardi's real organized like. She'd tear that shit up." Twill was a born criminal but he had a good heart. "I guess we could try it out," I said. "Cool. I told her to be at your office in the morning." "Without asking?" "Sure, Pops. I knew you'd say yes." Excerpted from Known to Evil by Walter Mosley All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.