On the road in a "borrowed" '36 Ford, nineteen-year-old Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins and his companion, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, are on a perilous odyssey that takes them from Houston to a mysterious bayou world of voodoo, sex, revenge, and death. Their destination is desolate Pariah, Texas - Mouse's home once, and still home to his hated stepfather. Encountering violent and unexpected threats, Easy and Mouse forge bonds that will link them in the decades...

Buying his freedom after serving as a translator during the American Indian wars, Cow Tom builds a remarkable life and legacy that is sustained by his courageous granddaughter.

After being approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a white woman from a black man, Easy embarks on an investigation that takes him from mountaintops to the desert, through South Central and into sex clubs and the homes of the fabulously wealthy, facing hippies, the mob, and old friends perhaps more dangerous than anyone else.

Nine stories highlight the complexities of being Black in modern America, including a Black son who visits his white father during the 1992 Los Angeles riots and a Black Republican whose skin disease is turning him white.

Surviving a near-fatal car wreck and cruising the streets of the Sunset Strip during the heyday of the late 1960s, Easy Rawlins investigates the disappearance of a young African-American, a case that is complicated by Rawlins's changing perspectives.

A man joins his friend on a trip for a weekend birthday party with a bunch of other men he doesn't know and discovers that he is the only black guy in the group.

Harry, a devilish charmer, turns up out of the blue on the South Central Los Angeles doorstep of his old friends. In short order, Harry's presence turns a seemingly peaceful household upside down, exposing smoldering tensions between parents and children, tradition and change, virtue and temptation. Interweaving evocative strains of gospel and blues with rich, poetic-realist images, it is a sublimely stirring film from an autonomous artistic sensibility,...

Fearing his friend, Christmas Black, has met his demise when the ex-Marine's daughter is left on his doorstep, reluctant L.A. detective Easy Rawlins finds the challenges of caring for a child further complicated by another friend's murder accusation.

Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghetto, starkly contrasting the attitudes of two generations of an embattled family, this book is a portrayal of human beings caught up in a dramatic struggle and of a society confronting inevitable change.

"[T]wo people brought together by a horrific act are united in a common cause by the powers of the Silver Box. The two join to protect humanity from destruction by an alien race, the Laz, hell-bent on regaining control over the Silver Box, the most destructive and powerful tool in the universe. The Silver Box will stop at nothing to prevent its former master from returning to being, even if it means finishing the earth itself" --