Devil in a Blue Dress Mosley exInplores racial tensions and cultural history by means of a plot set in Los Angeles of 1948. The narrator is the hard-boiled detective character Easy Rawlins, an African American veteran of World War II, currently out of work.

Like many of the characters who frequent the bars and other seedy venues of the story, Easy had left the segregated South to find work in California, but found disillusionment instead.

"Life was still hard in L. A. and if you worked every day you still found yourself on the bottom." White workers get better treatment "because they didn't come from a place where men were always called boys."

Financial need causes Easy to agree to work for a disreputable white man interested in finding a blond woman often seen in the clubs of Watts, a predominantly African American district. Easy's subsequent travels...