Mosley's tendency to see everything through his racial filter is given very wide rein here and, per usual, he's immersed in matters that are color-blind, like greed and a father's fears for the life of his child, for two examples.

He also presents his Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins character as a chick magnet like, possibly, never before. The beautiful women he encounters consistently throw themselves at his feet as though he were God's Gift. So, maybe, the character the author sees in his mind's eye isn't patterned on himself. Maybe it's more a case of Denzel Washington, his film alter ego. Yeah, has to be more like that.

It's 1967 and the Summer of Love when Easy's need for money to pay for his daughter Feather's treatment at a Swiss clinic is so great that he's actually thinking about participating in an armed robbery with his best friend Mouse. Fortunately, another option opens up when Saul Lynx lines him up for a job with Bobby Lee, a renowned private detective in San Francisco who farms his work out.

Easy might have, under less desperate circumstances, blown off the secretive operator who doesn't let his employees see his face. Even the rare beauty of Lee's representative Maya Adamant might not have influenced Easy to put up with a man who sets off his insult alarm. But that doesn't mean he's just going to take the job like a little trained monkey. When he threatens to walk out of Lee's office, he gets a face-to-face with the executive detective on the top floor, and then he takes the job.

He's to locate Lee's client's business associate Axel Bowers, who went missing with a briefcase containing documents, "white papers, printed in ink and sealed with red wax," he says. The liberal Berkeley lawyer stole them, and the key to where the thief might be found is through his former housekeeper-companion Philomena Cargill, aka, "Cinnamon" and she's "somewhere on the streets of L.A."

Easy finds Bowers first. Dead. And then the trail leads to Cinnamon. And she turns out to be even sexier and more beautiful than Maya. Also readier, more willing and, in possession of the white papers, which turn out to be bearer bonds with a mysterious Nazi connection. Before the case is over, Easy will be confronted by a stone killer hired by someone unknown, tested in his capacity for creative, sustained sex, puzzled by more dead bodies, wracked by fear for his daughter's life, and faced with a decision about his future with Bonnie.

Another fine outing with the master of race-laced suspense and intrigue who plays us with the notion that his street smart hero with axes to grind could consider crime when the need is great enough. But Mosley never writes his man into that corner, realizing that reader sympathy lies in having him make the honorable decision. It's just a device to put Rawlins into the context of potential immorality from which this exemplary father will always shy from, anyway. Never a doubt.