SOURCE: "Criminal Pursuits," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 14, 1991, p. 9.

Champlin is an American author, columnist, and critic. In the following excerpt, he remarks that A Red Death shows the success of Mosley's first book "was no accident. The new novel may be even better in its complexity and range."

Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress won a well-deserved Mystery Writers of American nomination as the best first novel of 1990. His portrait of Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins, a kind of reluctant and unofficial private investigator trying to stay alive and loose in Watts, had the ear-perfect dialogue, the eye-perfect observance and the narrative drive of, say, the work of Elmore Leonard. But the book had, additionally, the authority of the view from inside South-Central Los Angeles, looking out.

Mosley's second book, A Red Death, confirms that the first was no accident. The new novel may be even...