The creator of Easy Rawlins, Socrates Fortlow and Fearless Jones introduces a new detective struggling to live down his checkered past in present-day New York. Leonid McGill has never killed anyone maliciously, but he's done plenty of other bad things. Still working as a private eye in his 50s, he's decided to expiate his sins by going "from crooked to only slightly bent." So he's not eager to help Albany shamus Ambrose Thurman track down four men for vague and unpersuasive reasons, especially after he learns that one is dead, a second is in prison and a third is in a holding cell. Who pays $10,000 to locate men like these unless some further crime is involved? McGill isn't any happier about finding a union accountant for midlevel mobster Tony "The Suit" Towers. And he's deeply troubled when his computer spying in his own home tells him that Twill, his wife Katrina's 16-year-old son, plans to kill the father of a girl who's been sending him distraught e-mails. But the PI's heart drops to his shoes when he realizes that someone is executing the men he's been hired to locate for Thurman. Plotting has never been Mosley's strong point, but McGill, a red-diaper baby, ex-boxer and a man eternally at war with himself, may be his most compelling hero yet. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Mosley leaves behind the Los Angeles setting of his Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones series (Devil in a Blue Dress, etc.) to introduce Leonid McGill, a New York City private detective, who promises to be as complex and rewarding a character as Mosley's ever produced. McGill, a 53-year-old former boxer who's still a fighter, finds out that putting his past life behind him isn't easy when someone like Tony "The Suit" Towers expects you to do a job; when an Albany PI hires you to track down four men known only by their youthful street names; and when your 16-year-old son, Twill, is getting in over his head with a suicidal girl. McGill shares Easy's knack for earning powerful friends by performing favors and has some of the toughness of Fearless, but he's got his own dark secrets and hard-won philosophy. New York's racial stew is different than Los Angeles's, and Mosley stirs the pot and concocts a perfect milieu for an engaging new hero and an entertaining new series. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Mosley publishes so often and so eclectically that a new book is no longer an event a new mystery series, however, probably qualifies. After Easy Rawlins' apparent death in Blonde Faith (2007), Mosley leaves 1960s L.A. behind for contemporary New York City. Leonid McGill, a PI with a dirty conscience, has decided to change his ways after his past caught up with him and died, spitting blood and curses on the rug. Given his tangled professional and personal life, it's less a fresh start than a new take on existing moral quandaries. Readers familiar with Mosley will experience dejà vu regarding both McGill's complicated relationships and his pronouncements about life and how to live it. But despite the large cast of characters, McGill lacks a true foil. There was electricity when Mosley divided superego and id between Easy and Mouse, but there are fewer sparks here: McGill doesn't form meaningful connections to other characters, and how much readers enjoy spending time in his head will depend on how much they enjoy Mosley's oeuvre as a whole. And what do we get from the modern setting? Well, McGill uses high-tech spy gadgets, but ironically, he's a bit anachronistic, someone who would seem more at home in the 1960s than the 2000s. A few scenes recall vintage Mosley, but despite the change in series, his books are starting to blur.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2008 Booklist

New York Times best-selling author Mosley (www.waltermosley.com) here successfully moves from the postwar Los Angeles setting of his Easy Rawlins novels to 21st-century New York City and introduces a new hero: flawed, hard-boiled PI Leonid McGill, who commands respect as he walks knowingly into danger and tries to keep his family clear of it. Actor Mirron Willis portrays Leonid-from whose perspective the story unfolds-with a warm, easygoing voice that invites listeners to slow down and get involved in his complex world. Audiences will breathe a sigh of relief when he survives his adventure. For all hard-boiled mystery genre fans. ["Once you start reading this mystery," read the review of the Riverhead hc, "you won't want to stop," LJ 2/15/09.-Ed.]-Juleigh Muirhead Clark, Colonial Williamsburg Fdn. Lib., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Like the inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, every single one of my friends is exceptional, and I assume the same applies to your crowd. Which means that all our exceptional friends are expecting exceptional books for Christmas. Lucky for us, some favorite authors came through with genrestretchers this year. Tops on my list: THE SCARECROW (Little, Brown, $27.99), Michael Connelly's cri de coeur for the journalism profession he once practiced as a crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times. The techno-savvy serial killer who stalks through this thriller serves as a grim metaphor for the implacable forces Connelly sees as draining the life from the nation's newspapers. Walter Mosley also went off the grid this year with THE LONG FALL (Riverhead, $25.95), a big-bad-city crime novel, set in New York, that introduces a new hero in Leonid McGill, an ex-boxer who sets himself up as a private eye in an attempt to make amends for his past sins as a mob fixer. You never know what's in store when Ruth Rendell is writing as Barbara Vine, but her savage humor is on fine display in THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT (Shaye Areheart, $25). In this lethal political novel, a Conservative member of Parliament's attempt to cover up a sexual misadventure goes awry when his mistress is killed during a bogus kidnapping. Keep in mind that the author is herself a member of Parliament - and be prepared for plenty of political animus. It's always wise to expect the unexpected from Jeffery Deaver, whose technology-driven mysteries are the most fiendishly plotted in the genre. Alternativereality games are the devil in the machine in ROADSIDE CROSSES (Simon & Schuster, $26.95), a morbid thriller about California teenagers who turn into cyberbullies when they become addicted to violent role-playing on arcane Web sites. Although it's much harder to pull off something astonishing in a longstanding private-eye series, Sara Paretsky manages to do just that in her new V. I. Warshawski novel. HARDBALL (Putnam, $26.95) reaches back to the incendiary summer of 1966, when civil rights marches set off race riots in Chicago, to solve a case involving a youth who served as a bodyguard to Martin Luther King. The way Paretsky tells it - with fist raised in moral outrage - the anger is still fresh because the pain never goes away. Crimes of social injustice commonly fuel the action in mysteries by international authors. In A DARKER DOMAIN (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.99), Val McDermid returns to 1984 for a damning look at the coal miners' strike that tore the heart out of a working-class Scottish community. The criminal motivation in Arnaldur Indridason's ARCTIC CHILL (Minotaur, $24.99) can be traced to murderous racial prejudice against Asian immigrants in Iceland. Sex trafficking is the common theme of two high-impact Swedish thrillers: BOX 21 (Sarah Crichton/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26), by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, and THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE (Knopf, $25.95), by Stieg Larsson. Looking beyond the best sellers, there were several surprise hits this year. THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST (Soho, $25), a bleak, despairing first novel by Stuart Neville, is the most authentic piece of Irish noir fiction since Ken Bruen's thriller "The Guards." The brooding antihero, an I.R.A. enforcer during "the Troubles," sees the ghosts of the people he killed, and if he doesn't execute the men who ordered their deaths, these wrathful spirits will never let him rest. Strange as it sounds, Hannah Berry also catches the essence of noir in her first graphic novel, BRITTEN AND BRÜLIGHTLY (Metropolitan/Holt, paper, $20). The eerie narrative, elegantly drawn in sharp lines and monochromatic hues, conveys the metaphysical collapse of a melancholy private eye who specializes in confirming his clients' worst fears about their cheating lovers. The characters who wander into the Tick Tock restaurant in THIS WICKED WORLD (Little, Brown, $23.99), a first novel by Richard Lange, are the kind of drifters and grifters who give Hollywood Boulevard its local color. Jimmy Boone, the ex-con who tends bar at the Tick Tock, is an anomaly in this crowd - a guy who lives to help people. Charlie Huston lives to shock. But not even his novels about a vampire private eye have the kick of THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH (Ballantine, $25). In this outlandish but rather sweet crime caper, a young slacker who works as a "trauma cleaner" (the guy who scrapes up the blood and gore after someone commits suicide) gets caught in a range war between rival cleaning companies. The oddball characters are originals; the dialogue is sublime. Speaking of sweet stuff, consider THE CASE OF THE MISSING SERVANT (Simon & Schuster, $24), by Tarquin Hall. This first novel is set in Delhi, where Vish Puri, founder and director of Most Private Investigators Ltd., performs discreet investigations into the backgrounds of prospective grooms, with surprising and often comic results. Other appealing oddities: THE BROKEN TEAGLASS (Delacorte, $25), a literary gem by Emily Arsenault, set in the fusty offices of a venerable publishing house and showcasing the research skills of two young lexicographers who discover clues to an unsolved murder in the citation files, and THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE (Delacorte, $23), Alan Bradley's English country-house mystery about a precocious child who is training herself to be a scientific sleuth by working her way through "An Elementary Study of Chemistry." Luckily for mystery readers, some favorite authors came through with genre-stretchers in 2009.