Easy Rawlins mysteries

Easy Rawlins, a tough World War II veteran and detective, is hired by a financier and gangster to locate Daphne Monet, a search that leads him from elegant boardrooms to the raucous jazz joints of late 1940s Los Angeles.

Overview: The police don't show up on Easy Rawlins's doorstep until the third girl dies. It's Los Angeles, 1956, and it takes more than one murdered black girl before the cops get interested. Now they need Easy. As he says: " I was worth a precinct full of detectives when the cops needed the word in the ghetto." But Easy turns them down. He's married now, a father - and his detective days are over. Then a white college coed dies the same brutal death,...

Easy Rawlins, working as a school janitor in Los Angeles, is seduced by a teacher into taking her dog, which her husband is threatening to kill. When the husband is murdered, Rawlins becomes the prime suspect and must clear his name. By the author of Black Betty.

When a boxer-turned-revolutionary kidnaps the daughter of a weapons manufacturer and threatens to publicly execute her in exchange for a lucrative ransom, Easy Rawlins is tapped by the LAPD to make a difficult border crossing to navigate an ensuing standoff.

1969. Easy Rawlins, the Black private detective whose small agency finally has its own office, gets a visit from a white Vietnam veteran. The young man claims he and his lover were attacked in a citrus grove at the city's outskirts. He may have killed a man, and the woman and his dog are now missing. Inclined to turn down what sounds like nothing but trouble, Easy takes the case when he realizes how damaged the young vet is from his war experiences....