The Long Fall (Leonid McGill Series #1)

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The Long Fall (Leonid McGill Series #1)

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Overview

The widely praised New York Times bestseller, and Mosley's first new series since his acclaimed Easy Rawlins novels...

Leonid McGill is an ex-boxer and a hard drinker looking to clean up his act. He's an old-school P.I. working a New York City that's gotten a little too fancy all around him. But it's still full of dirty secrets, and as McGill unearths them, his commitment to the straight and narrow is going to be tested to the limit...

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101011379
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/24/2009
Series:	Leonid McGill Series , #1
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	38,669
File size:	352 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Walter Mosley is one of America’s most celebrated, beloved, and bestselling writers. His books have been translated into at least twenty-one languages, and have won numerous awards. Born in Los Angeles, Mosley lives in New York City.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

January 12, 1952

Place of Birth:

Los Angeles, California

Education:

B.A., Johnson State College

Website:

http://www.waltermosley.com

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Editorial Reviews

While nowhere near as charming as Rawlins, McGill is easy to like, given the character-building temptations that come his way as he tries to be an honest investigator and a good family man…All things considered, McGill is someone you can definitely settle down with.
—The New York Times

Marilyn Stasio

After Easy Rawlins and Paris Minton, Mosley's best-known creations, McGill is a welcome conundrum. A detective in the classic noir style—cynical, romantic, doomed—who exists not in the 1940s but in today's New York City…We follow eagerly, seduced by Mosley's laconic style and by a newly arrived hero who seems to have been around forever.
—The Washington Post

Anna Mundow

Mosley leaves behind the Los Angeles setting of his Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones series (Devil in a Blue Dress, etc.) to introduce Leonid McGill, a New York City private detective, who promises to be as complex and rewarding a character as Mosley's ever produced. McGill, a 53-year-old former boxer who's still a fighter, finds out that putting his past life behind him isn't easy when someone like Tony "The Suit" Towers expects you to do a job; when an Albany PI hires you to track down four men known only by their youthful street names; and when your 16-year-old son, Twill, is getting in over his head with a suicidal girl. McGill shares Easy's knack for earning powerful friends by performing favors and has some of the toughness of Fearless, but he's got his own dark secrets and hard-won philosophy. New York's racial stew is different than Los Angeles's, and Mosley stirs the pot and concocts a perfect milieu for an engaging new hero and an entertaining new series. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

Mosley, a master of detective stories best known for his Easy Rawlins series, introduces Leonid McGill, a reformed bad man who strives to hold to his own principles in the roughest situations. Cops don't trust him, hard guys pressure him, and most people underestimate him. His wife abandoned him but now wants him back, two of their kids aren't his, and he's in love with a beautiful woman who's trying to kick him out of his office. McGill is hired to find the names and addresses of four men. Soon, they're all dead, and he wants to know why. The violence escalates, but he refuses to give up. Mosley always tells a compelling story, and this is no exception. But, unlike the Rawlins novels, it has an air of the formulaic. It takes too many digressions to explain McGill's past, and while the Rawlins's Mouse comes across persuasively as a particularly lethal product of the harsh ghettos, McGill's Hush, an ex-hit man who now drives a limousine, seems too good (or bad) to be real. For all its flaws, though, once you start reading this mystery, you won't want to stop. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/08.]
—David Keymer

Library Journal

The creator of Easy Rawlins, Socrates Fortlow and Fearless Jones introduces a new detective struggling to live down his checkered past in present-day New York. Leonid McGill has never killed anyone maliciously, but he's done plenty of other bad things. Still working as a private eye in his 50s, he's decided to expiate his sins by going "from crooked to only slightly bent." So he's not eager to help Albany shamus Ambrose Thurman track down four men for vague and unpersuasive reasons, especially after he learns that one is dead, a second is in prison and a third is in a holding cell. Who pays $10,000 to locate men like these unless some further crime is involved? McGill isn't any happier about finding a union accountant for midlevel mobster Tony "The Suit" Towers. And he's deeply troubled when his computer spying in his own home tells him that Twill, his wife Katrina's 16-year-old son, plans to kill the father of a girl who's been sending him distraught e-mails. But the PI's heart drops to his shoes when he realizes that someone is executing the men he's been hired to locate for Thurman. Plotting has never been Mosley's strong point, but McGill, a red-diaper baby, ex-boxer and a man eternally at war with himself, may be his most compelling hero yet.

Kirkus Reviews

Walter Mosley was not the first black crime writer, nor was he the first to fuse genre conventions with larger social concerns. But when Devil in a Blue Dress introduced the Los Angeles-based private detective Easy Rawlins nearly 20 years ago, it was clear the author set out to stretch the boundaries of the mystery and thriller framework. There were larger questions to ask, more ambiguous answers to discover, and as filtered through the complex world view of Easy's own loves and losses, they took on additional and more identifiable resonance for the reader. As what would become an 11-novel epic sequence unfolded, so did one of Mosley's most ambitious aims -- to chronicle the sea changes in American race relations from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the civil rights movement.
Easy's quest effectively ended with Blonde Faith, but Mosley remains a restless seeker of truth. He's spent his career, with varying degrees of success, flitting in and out of different genres such as science fiction (Blue Light), erotica (Diablerie), young adult (47), and more mainstream fare (the sorely underrated R.L.'s Dream), not to mention prescriptive non-fiction (What Next: An African American Initiative Toward World Peace) and advice (This Year You Write Your Novel). But Mosley's innate compass keeps returning to his true north of crime fiction -- whether embodied in the lighthearted Fearless Jones trilogy of detective novels or the darker, more episodic chronicles of ex-convict Socrates Fortlow. Now, Mosley debuts an auspicious new series teeming with questions more contemporary and more personal, and answers even more difficult to tease out.
"Blood debt is the curse of mankind," remarks one of the supporting players in The Long Fall -- the richest and most pervasive metaphor in a book overstuffed with them. Her sad refrain is directed toward Leonid McGill, a private investigator in latter-day Manhattan who owes his hybrid name to a fervent Communist father, "two inches shorter and forty pounds heavier than a man should be" with a three-day-a-week standing gig in a boxing ring at Gordo's Gym. After "fifty-three years of hard living" Leonid understands the curse of blood debt all too well: "In the years before, I had no problem bringing people down, even framing them with false evidence if that's what the client paid for. I didn't mind sending innocent men, or women, to prison because I didn't believe in innocence -- and virtue didn't pay the bills. That was before my past caught up with me and died, spitting blood and curses on the rug."
No one, least of all Leonid, expects him to morph into a knight errant of pure heart and mind: "Most guys when they see a damsel in a lonely tower want to ride up and save her -- but I knew better. My kind of help shorted out the circuit board, or stripped the gears in your transmission." But the symbolic realization that "all of a sudden you aren't the man holding the gun but about to be shot" leaves him with hope he can lighten the blackened edges of his soul, even a little. So his latest case, to find the last of four men involved in a situation that turned the first three into "rotten apples," will not offer the prospect of redemption, but it will lay bare Leonid's quirky sense of duty and reveal the furious and criminal heart pounding beneath the surface of gentrification.
The sense of duty is most apparent with regard to Leonid's family, a domestic assemblage notable for its chipped veneer and mismatched parts. Its authority is still strong enough to keep him away from Aura, the capable woman Leonid loves and who, inexplicably (to him), returns that love because he is "a man on the road...right out there in the light of day." His wife, Katrina, acts the part of the perfect, kitchen-wizard wife, her spousal deference an ill-fated attempt to repair her part of the mutual infidelity that's lasted for decades. Their African-American/Nordic blonde merger produces three children, but only one -- Dmitri, a taciturn college student who barely speaks to Leonid -- is a true genetic co-production. As a result Leonid spends much time conflicted about his eldest, Shelly's, overt aims to please and, in "a mix of worry and wonderment," about his youngest son, Twill's, increasingly wayward and criminal ways. When Mosley assembles the McGill family for dinner, the results are painful and awkward, a postracial version of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
Leonid, however, has much occasion to keep away from the messy conflicts of home as his search for the fourth man, one Roger Brown, takes him all over the map: upstate to Syracuse, within spitting distance of Gracie Mansion, and in close proximity to the violent deaths of others and the possibility of his own demise: "There's a different kind of death waiting for each and everyone one of us -- each and every day of our lives." Leonid questions what others assume and trusts little, but what remains immutable is that he belongs nowhere else but New York City and its continued state of flux: "Most other American municipalities are segregated by class and culture, education and personal choice. But in New York everybody is jumbled up together and bounced around until you have African princes walking side by side with Appalachian Daughters of the American Revolution, and aspiring starlets making room for hopeful housewives past their prime. Even with real estate costs climbing above the reach of almost everyone, you can still find all the elements of humanity riding the number 1 train down under the West Side of Manhattan."
Mosley does not shy away from the harrowing consequences of Leonid's attempts to right his moral wrongs, leaving the private detective longing for a sense of salvation he craves but knows is still beyond his grasp. But The Long Fall also acts as an aperitif for a potentially rich meal to be doled out over further installments: Mosley sets the novel in early 2008, when "people on Madison Avenue didn't mind dark skins" and considered voting for Obama -- if they voted. The change of the calendar opens up a number of fascinating possibilities for Leonid McGill to spend as much time investigating the mysteries of self as he does looking into the abyss deep beneath the supposed harmony of a nation in thrall to audacious hope. -- Sarah Weinman
Sarah Weinman reviews crime fiction for the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun and blogs about the genre at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind (http://www.sarahweinman.com).

Sarah Weinman

The Long Fall (Leonid McGill Series #1)

The Long Fall (Leonid McGill Series #1)

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