Two years ago, Walter Mosley announced that “Blonde Faith” was to be his last Easy Rawlins mystery. I’ve been mad at Mosley ever since. In “Known to Evil” ($25.95), Leonid McGill is a P.I. in New York, “shorter than most” and “tougher than many” trying to get in front of his “iniquitous past.” He’s an alienated man “home-schooled on Hegel, Marx and Bakunin.”
He has a sharp eye, a quick fist and a way with women who have a way with him. His wife and his mistress are cheating on him, his sons are cruising the mean streets way over the speed limit, and he’s been hired to solve the murder of a woman who has ties to Big Bosses and Big Government.
After reading this, I’m starting to forgive Mosley.
As if the world wasn’t already noisy enough for Chief Inspector Mark Lapslie, who suffers from synesthesia (he experiences sounds as tastes), now he can smell a murderer. In Nigel McCrery’s “Tooth and Claw” ($25.95), the second to feature Lapslie, the “cross-wiring of his senses” has worsened, condemning him “to a monastic life of near silence and contemplation.”
This complex mystery matches the psychological depth and suspense of Patricia Highsmith or even Ruth Rendell. When a minor celebrity is tortured and murdered, Lapslie is forced from his sick leave to investigate. McCrery is gruesome in his depictions of crimes and unflinching in his characterization of their motivations, and as the narrative shifts between Lapslie’s mental deterioration and the killer’s (he’s revealed early), McCrery’s builds to a murderous conclusion that made me gasp.
“Expiration Date” by Duane Swierczynski ($13.99) is a time-twisting genre-bending crime novel. Mickey Wade’s a likable out-of-work 30-something journalist whose “worldly possessions fit into a 2009 Prius” — not his. Mickey collects classic records, “vintage paperback mysteries” and anything by Hunter S. Thompson.
After finding solace in too many cheap beers, Mickey wakes with the mother of all hangovers. He’s out of sorts, and he’s also out of time.
Mickey’s traveled back to the ’70s, where he’s an invisible man, sunlight melts his body parts and he sees dead people. This bullet of a book is packed with allusions to pop culture as Mickey ricochets between then and now while he tries to solve a crime in the past so he can protect his existence in the present.
This hard-boiled — no, make that deliciously scrambled — story would make the kind of film Johnny Depp would want to star in, Elmore Leonard would want to script, Terry Gilliam would insist on directing, and whose soundtrack would be available on an LP.
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