Walter Mosley - A Little Yellow Dog (Easy Rawlins 5)

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR WALTER
MOSLEYS EASY RAWLINS NOVELS

A LITTLE YELLOW DOG

[A] well-energized and crafty volume.

The New York Times Book Review

Mosley writes with a pure, true voice. A Little Yellow Dog marks another winner for its remarkable author.

Houston Chronicle

A Little Yellow Dog is just as smoky and sexy as Devil In a Blue Dress. [Mosley] tells his story fast and hard, sometimes funny, sometimes lyrical.

San Jose Mercury News

Easy Rawlins is back, which is great news. Mosleys thrillers, always thrilling, are salutary as well.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

How does Walter Mosley do it? Each Easy Rawlins mystery is better than its predecessorricher, more nuanced and, in this case, funnier.

Newsday

Mosley just writes so wellso crisply, so smoothly. His view of human nature is bone-solid realistic, no illusions.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Early 1960s black Los Angeles is alive in the look and talk of the book. Easy is a cool dude struggling to stay alive and make sense of his tough and tawdry world.

Boston Sunday Globe

BLACK BETTY

Detective fiction at its bestbold, breathtaking, and brutal.

Chicago Sun-Times

As always, Mosleys grip on character is compelling.

People

Compelling, multilayered.

The Washington Post

Black Betty is moody, absorbing, and disquieting as a recurrent dream.

New York Daily News

Mysteries dont get much better than this.

Detroit Free Press

WHITE BUTTERFLY

Rawlins might be the best American character to appear in quite some time.

Entertainment Weekly

Compelling. In all of American fiction, only Richard Wright treats Americas race problem more savagely.

Village Voice Literary Supplement

With White Butterfly, Walter Mosley has established himself as one of Americas best mystery writers.

The New York Times Book Review

Powerful. Like its predecessors, White Butterfly provides excitement, social commentary, and clever, syncopated dialogue. If [Philip] Marlowe was tough, Easy has to be even tougher.

Washington Post Book World

A RED DEATH

Fascinating and vividly rendered exotic and believable, filled with memorable individuals and morally complex situations.

The Wall Street Journal

Exhilaratingly original.

Philadelphia Inquirer

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS

I read Devil in a Blue Dress in one sitting and didnt want it to end. An astonishing first novel.

Jonathan Kellerman

The social commentary is sly, the dialogue fabulous, the noir atmosphere so real you could touch it. A first novel? Thats what they say. Amazing. Smashing.

Cosmopolitan

Richly atmospheric. A fast-moving, entertaining story.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

GONE FISHIN

It is, in some respects, the best of Mosleys novels. Mosley displays a pitch-perfect gift for capturing the cadences of black speech that rivals the dialogue in Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man.

Time

A powerfully raw, lyrical coming-of-age story. This late encounter with the early Easy offers an extra dimension to readers who have met, in previous stories, the man he grew to be.

Publishers Weekly

BOOKS BY WALTER MOSLEY

PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS

Devil in a Blue Dress

A Red Death

White Butterfly

Black Betty

A Little Yellow Dog

Gone Fishin

WALTER
MOSLEY

AN EASY RAWLINS MYSTERY

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY SINGAPORE

The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as unsold and destroyed. Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this stripped book.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Washington Square Press Publication of
Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 1996 by Walter Mosley

Gray-Eyed Death copyright 2002 by Walter Mosley

Published by arrangement with W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information address W. W. Norton & Company7, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

ISBN: 0-7434-5180-5
eISBN: 978-1-4516-1249-3

First Washington Square Press trade paperback printing November 2002

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are
registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Cover art by Don Kilpatrick III

Printed in the U.S.A.

For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

IT WAS THE DOGS FAULT.

A CAR DOOR SLAMMED on the street somewhere but it didnt mean anything to me. I was at home drinking lemonade from the fruit of my own trees on a Saturday in L.A. Nobody was after me. My slate was clean. Bonnie had gone out with her friend Shirley, Jesus was taking sailing lessons near Redondo Beach, and Feather had gone down the street to her little boyfriends house, a shy red-headed child named Henry Hopkins.

Just four weeks before I would have spent my solitary time wondering if I should ask Bonnie to be my bride. But she had spent a weekend on the island of Madagascar with a man named Joguye Cham. He was the son of an African prince born in Senegal while I was born a poor black orphan.

Bonnie swore that the time they spent together was platonic but that didnt mean much to me. A man who expected to be a king, who was working to liberate and empower a whole continent, wanted Bonnie by his side.

How could I compete with that?

How could she wake up next to me year after year, getting older while I made sure the toilets at Sojourner Truth Junior High School were disinfected? How could she be satisfied with a janitor when a man who wanted to change the world was calling her name?

Sharp footsteps on concrete followed the slamming door.

Bonnie had made my life work perfectly for a while. She never worried about my late-night meetings or when I went out for clues to the final fate of my old friend Mouse. I knew he was dead but I needed to hear it from the woman who saw him die. EttaMae admitted that she buried him in a nameless grave.

The footsteps ended at my door. They were the footsteps of a small man. I expected Jackson Blue to appear. Maybe he wanted my advice about his crazy love affair with Jewelle now that Mofass was dead. Or maybe he had some scheme he wanted to run past me. Either way it would be better than moping around, wishing that my woman wasnt born to be a queen.