Devil in a Blue Dress is the first installment in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series. The story opens in Joppy Shag’s near-empty bar above a butcher shop in Watts, Los Angeles. The time is 1948. Easy Rawlins, just fired from his manufacturing job at Champion Aircraft, is having an afternoon drink, wondering how he’s going to cover his next mortgage payment, when a white man walks in and makes him an offer.

DeWitt Albright, with his pale skin, white suit and strawberry blond hair doesn’t seem to care if he looks out of place in this scene. He offers Rawlins cash up front to find a missing woman, the devil in a blue dress who’s been known to frequent the same dive bars and jazz clubs that Rawlins himself hangs out in.

This is the first I’ve read of Simenon’s Maigret series. I can’t believe the author was only twenty-eight when he wrote this. His writing has a surety and solidness that many never achieve. The few who do find it take many years to get there.

This case involves what appears to be the simple murder of a traveling salesman in a Loire Valley hotel during the hot summer of 1930. Maigret approaches the investigation with the dread of one assigned a sordid, depressing, and tedious task. The wife of the deceased is proud and disagreeable, the son cold and distant, the hotel a second rate holiday stop for families on a budget.

The Troubled Man is the final installment in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, and the only one of the series I’ve read. I found the book in a Little Free Library in a park in Virginia. I picked it up, because I felt quite troubled at the time. I saw the title and thought, “That’s me.”

In this book, Wallander, a police officer in a small coastal town in Sweden, is sixty years old and spends a lot of time reflecting on his life. His daughter, Linda, also a police officer, has just had her first child with a man named Hans.

My designer, the brilliant and stunning Lindsay Heider Diamond , has come up with yet another excellent cover for my next book. We hope to have this one out sometime this summer.

Published in 1966, One Fearful Yellow Eye is the eighth book in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. This one takes place mostly in Chicago, where McGee has travelled to help an old friend. Gloria “Glory” Doyle was one those “broken birds” McGee had taken in and for a period of healing after her life had gone wrong. Her happily-ever-after came in the form of marriage to the good and caring Dr. Fortner Geis.

This story opens with a call from Glory. It seems someone had been extorting the late Dr. Geis in the final year of his life, draining his savings bit by bit until there was nothing left of the substantial estate his family had expected him to pass on. Dr. Geis’ children from his first marriage, Heidi and Roger, despise Glory for marrying their father, an older widower, just three years before his death. They see her as the gold digger who stole all their money, and she wants to clear her name.

I just finished a draft of a new novel, tentatively titled Evidence of Aggression. This one features a strong female lead who gets caught up unawares in a Hitchcock-style thriller that unfolds in my old hometown of Washington, DC. Think North by Northwest in current day DC, with a sharp, strong-willed woman in the Carey Grant role.

Eight Million Ways to Die is the fifth in Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder detective series. You don’t need to have read any others in the series to follow this one.

Scudder is a former New York City cop who quit the force after accidentally killing a child while pursuing two thieves. By the time the book begins, he has long since left his family, and has been living for years in a mid-town Manhattan hotel. He makes his living under the table, as a cash-only unlicensed detective. His training helps him out, as do his connections on the force and on the street. His chronic drinking hinders him.

Black Money is the thirteenth book in Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series. It opens with Archer discussing the terms of a new case over lunch at a tennis club in the fictional coastal town of Montevista, CA, an hour or so south of Los Angeles. The client, Peter Jamieson, is twenty-four years old, rich, depressed, and increasingly fat as he eats away the sorrows of a broken engagement.

Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time is the fifth in a series of mysteries featuring inspector Alan Grant. The book is perhaps best known for the praise it received from mystery writer and critic Anthony Boucher, who called it one of the best mysteries of all time. That’s high praise to live up to, but the author began the book with higher aims than most mystery writers ever aspire to, and she made it clear in the first chapter that she wasn’t going to follow the traditional path to achieve them.

This book contains some brilliant writing and colorful characters. It’s a freewheeling 1970s update on the classic noir detective novel.

The book begins just as private eye C.W. Sughrue is catching up to famed author Abraham Trahearne. Trahearne has been touring the seedy dive bars of the western states on an epic bender since his second wife disappeared. Sughrue was hired by the author’s first wife to bring him back home. The detective and fugitive are well matched for adventure. Both are war veterans and literate, intelligent, reckless alcoholics.