text: The amount of violence in this book is excessive over relatively insignificant motives.  I had a hard time believing all this was happening in 1948.  I am not questioning Mosley's portrayal of racism.  However, I did a little research into just how violent place Los Angeles was in 1948, and the answer is not very.  There may have been poverty, racism, alcholism, but L.A. county seemed pretty safe; the late 1940s had some of the lowest homicide rates since as far back as one researcher was able to find, 1827!  Mosley may have been more familiar with L.A. of the 1970s and 1980s and just assumed that it had always been that way.  Throw in speakeasies, gangsters hijacking liquor trucks, and one gets the impression that Mosley is confusing the 1948 with 1928.
  
  I am not so pedantic as to insist that fiction be historically accurate.  But many, many people hail Mosley for depicting a dark side of life/era/place that had not been shown before.  From what I can tell, he has simply combined stereotypes from the 1920s and 1970s (I guess those years average to be about 1948).  Mosley is depicting a fantasy world of his own creation.  However, I doubt he ever tried to pass it off as authentic, and I hope readers realize that it is not.
  
  Easy Rawlins in this novel falls into the rather weak, but unfortunately large, group of fictional detectives that actually accomplish little detecting.  A detective actually solves a mystery using his own intellect; that is interesting to read.  Detectives in less skilled hands solve mysteries via  confession.  Easy does solve one of the murders on his own, but just about everything he "solves" is simply confessed to him.  I find that extremely dissatisfying.
  
  Mosley has packed the book with violence, but seems to know very little about violence himself.  None of the fights are well described.  Easy, for being a self-professed "killing machine" can't actually fight worth a damn and is surrounded by guns but does not apparently know anything about them.  They are either big or they are small.  He does not come of as being hard-boiled, but rather a pathetic braggart
  
  Mosley does show signs of being a very good writer.  But I think he is too far over his head in this genre to come up with something exceptional.  I imagine that his work must have improved, but this effort is nothing to get exceited over.  And again, I don't obsess over accuracy, but a little bit of research would have gone a long way in firming the foundation of this novel.
  