SOURCE: Phillips, Mike. “Novel of the Week.” New Statesman 129, no. 4431 (9 April 1999): 50.

In the following review, Phillips argues that Blue Light is ultimately an unsuccessful attempt by Mosley to break away from the expectations readers have developed of him as an African American crime writer.

When novelists run out of steam they invariably turn to allegorical science fiction. Sometimes they play with crime fiction, but it is, in its way, too demanding as a genre for exhausted writers, and they usually end up rendering the mystery element as an “interesting” subplot, designed to display their technical versatility. In Blue Light it is hard to work out where Walter Mosley is going. The novel is a species of sci-fi allegory, but the effect is an amalgam of styles and ideas, ranging from the obscure to the embarrassingly banal.

The problem is the box in which African American writers are trapped...