Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins tracks down the perpetrator of a murder that is obscured by the race riots during six days of 1965 in Los Angeles. He takes us on a ride through the alleys and dark streets of South Central where the blacks rose up against their white oppressors after a routine arrest of a black motorist for drunk driving.

Along the ride, Walter Mosley's uncredentialed P.I. points out the frustrations and hopelessness of his community like passing billboards of social discontent, where many a black was as victimized by the wanton destruction as targetted landlords.

All of which tended to obscure the cause behind the murder of Nola Payne, aka, "Little Scarlet," a red-headed woman found shot and strangled in her apartment building--the work of a crazy man. When witnesses describe a man having been wrenched from his car at the peak of the mob's wrath, and escaping into that apartment building, and given shelter by Nola Payne, the obvious first assumptions are that he's the killer.

But the police are constrained by the powerful antagonisms against them in these neighborhoods. They can't go investigating into black neighborhoods to track the vanished man down nor allow anything about the case to leak to the press. For the job of finding the vanished killer, only a black man could be expected to get anywhere and, for that, they come to Easy Rawlins. After the white police chief, as guilty of profiling as anyone but smart enough to understand the risks of Rawlins's mission, gives him a letter that virtually deputizes him and provides some immunity from bullying cops along the way, Easy accepts the job. He brings in longtime pal Mouse to help him break through the blanket of fear descending like an inversion layer of heat and danger into the post-riot community trauma.

The illogic of the facts immediately arouses Easy's doubts. A man gets taken from his car by a mob amd turns out to be a murderer? He escapes and kills the only person granting him secrecy and protection? Too unlikely a theory for Rawlins to accept. His investigation will support his early suspicions that there's a serial killer on the loose--a man whose string of homicides has never been related as one man's output, and whose identity as a quiet homeless person has ensured his obscurity.

Mosley uses this background to express his own rage at racial inequality but his message about racial character is not one-sided. His depiction includes sociopathic individuals on both sides of the law. He explores, as well, a pervasive structure of self-condemnation within the black community, revealing hierarchical attitudes that are as demeaning as those of any red neck. The range in the quality of Mosley's characters are as varied as society's itself: the scuzballs and the decent are included among all colorations. His own family is multi-hued, his condemnations are broad and inclusive, all of which makes his racial commentaries impervious to any charge of imbalance.

But, his work is as immersed in race as a reef in the ocean and we readers jump in with both flippers. His book doesn't so much shed light on the psychological dynamics of a mass uprising or how it is used as an excuse for personal opportunism, as set the background for a crime thriller with a unique set of issues only such a unique writer can deliver with the proper authority.