The vehicle Mosley has chosen by way of plot is neatly ironic and perfectly mirrors the social inversion of the times: A black woman, Nola Payne (the Little Scarlet of the title — she has red hair), has been brutally murdered. Fingers are pointed, inevitably, at a white man who was seen with her in Watts during her last hours. But in the high fever of boiling racial tension, the last thing the white cops need is a white perpetrator. On the other hand, failure to investigate would also be seen as highly provocative by the black community. Escalation must be avoided at all costs. Only a child of the streets, a black man with no direct affiliation to white authority, a humble 45-year-old with enough civic responsibility and integrity to be interested in keeping the uneasy peace that followed the riots — a big, comfortable, family man blessed with quiet charm who can take care of himself in a punch-up and talk back to white cops who do not appreciate his mission and have a lot to hide when it comes to the identity of the true killer — only Easy, in other words, can possibly save this day that rests on a knife edge. But our hero, with the help of the young and voluptuous Juanda, quickly establishes that the white man didn’t do it. The more he digs, the more the evidence points to a quite different kind of villain. So where in L.A. is the culprit? How many black women has he killed already? Why did he kill them? Why haven’t the cops investigated him in the past and — above all — what color is he? In the end, naturally, the perpetrator is identified thanks to Easy, who almost single-handedly defuses this social time bomb.

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