Walter Ellis Mosley is an award-winning American novelist who is best known for his crime fiction. Mosley has written over fifty literary works across many genres, including multiple best-selling mysteries, thrillers, nonfiction, graphic novels, and more. Which such an expansive list of books to choose from, you might be wondering where to start with Walter Mosley’s books. So why not start with the best? Here are the five top-rated Walter Mosley books, according to Goodreads.
Mosley returns to mysteries at last with his most engaging hero since Easy Rawlins. When Paris Minton meets a beautiful new woman, before he knows it he has been beaten up, slept with, shot at, robbed, and his bookstore burned to the ground. He’s in so much trouble he has no choice but to get his friend, Fearless Jones, out of jail to help him.
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Blood Grove is another highly-rated novel following private detective Easy Rawlins. In this book, Easy is approached by a white Vietnam veteran who shares a story that makes very little sense. The young man says he and his lover, a beautiful young woman, were attacked. He also claims he may have killed a man, and that the woman and her dog are now missing. The case feels like trouble to Easy, but he sympathizes with a fellow veteran and takes it anyway. But this is only the beginning of Easy’s troubles in this page-turner.
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Down the River unto the Sea is one of the highest rated Walter Mosley books. Marooned in an apartment that overflows with mementos from the past, 91-year-old Ptolemy Grey is all but forgotten by his family and the world. But when an unexpected opportunity arrives, everything changes for Ptolemy in ways as shocking and unanticipated as they are poignant and profound.
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The name Easy Rawlins stirs excitement in the hearts of readers and fear in the hearts of his foes. His success has bought him a thriving detective agency, with its first female detective; a remote home, shared with children and pets and lovers, high atop the hills overlooking gritty Los Angeles; and more trouble, more problems, and more threat to those whom he loves. In other words, he’s still beset on all sides.
A number of below-the-law powerbrokers plead with Easy to locate a mysterious, dangerous woman—Lutisha James, though she’s gone by another name that Easy will immediately recognize. 1970s Los Angeles is a transient city of delicate, violent balances, and Lutisha has disturbed that. She also has a secret that will upend Easy’s own life, painfully closer to home.
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Considered one of Mosley’s best, Devil in a Blue Dress is one of the top rated books by the author on Goodreads. In Los Angeles of the late 1940s, Easy Rawlins, a black war veteran, has just been fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend’s bar, wondering how he’ll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Monet, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.
Format
Hardcover
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Emily Martin has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi. She’s a contributing editor at Book Riot and blogs/podcasts at Book Squad Goals.
