SOURCE: "Easy on the Case," in Chicago Tribune—Books, June 26, 1994, p. 3.

Levine is an American journalist and author of the "Jake Lassiter" series of novels. In the following review of Black Betty, he compares Mosley's Easy Rawlins to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and praises Mosley's powers of description, asserting that he "captures a time and place with dead-on perfect detail and evocative language."

Ezekiel "Essay" Rawlins, the reluctant P.I., is older and wiser in Walter Mosley's latest period mystery, but that doesn't stop him from taking on the case of the sensual and dangerous Elizabeth Eady, a. k. a. Black Betty.

Easy was a raggedy 12-year-old when he first encountered Black Betty, "a great shark of a woman. Men died in her wake." Both traveled far from Houston's Fifth Ward, where Easy had "just enough clothes to keep me decent and ten cents less than I needed...