The last time I interviewed Walter Mosley, he said he was done with Easy Rawlins. He was putting him down to pursue other interests. I gathered Easy was ready to vacate the brilliant expanse of Mosley's imagination to pursue other interest himself. I think he'll be back, which is why Mosley deftly left open the door for his return in the fade-to-black ending of 'Blonde Faith,' the last book in the Rawlins series.

In the meantime, we get 'The Long Fall,' a new Mosley private detective novel, starring Leonid McGill, a 53-year erstwhile boxer in New York City, who spends as much time boxing with himself--figuratively and literally--as he does with his clients and investigative targets.
"I hit the that bag with dozens of deadly combinations but in the end I was the one who was defeated, crouched over with my gloves on my knees,'' McGill says.

McGill may be as knotty and satisfying a character as Rawlins. He has an ignominious past pockmarked by heavy drinking and masterful, yet bumbling investigative skills shored up by crooked jobs. He is married. To hear him tell it, barely: "My wife didn't love me and two out of three grown and nearly grown children were not of my blood."

For work, he operates in 21st Century New York, where old-school mobsters hang on to their residual power and favors with a vice grip. Good thing the squat McGill is still fit from the boxing.



"I still plied my trade but now I worried about things,'' McGill says.

"In the years before, I had no problem bringing people down, even framing them with false evidence if that's what the client paid for,'' McGill says. "I didn't mind sending an innocent man, or woman, to prison because I didn't believe in innocence-and virtue didn't pay the bills. That was before my past caught up with me and died, spitting blood and curses on the rug.''

McGill has been contracted to find four men. He already has found three of them. One was dead, one in prison, and the third was awaiting trial. "Of the four, only Roger Brown, if this was indeed the Roger Brown I was looking, had made some kind of life for himself, the kind of life where a pretty young white girl called him Mister in an office of first names,'' McGill says.

But when he suspects he has unknowingly been hired to help commit murder, he turns to old criminal connections to help settle the score in this tightly woven whodunit.

'The Long Fall' promises to entertain and delivers Mosley's usual commanding prose. McGill might even make you forget about Easy for the time being.