return to home  
Join   |  Gift   |  Member Login   |  Library Login
BookBrowse Mobile
Follow Us: 
   Book Excerpt

Read free book excerpt from Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley, plus multiple reviews, author biography & more

Little Scarlet

Little Scarlet
An Easy Rawlins Mystery
by Walter Mosley
Hardcover: Jul 2004,
320 pages.
Paperback: Apr 2005,
352 pages.

Publication information
Author Information
Critics' Opinion:   
Readers' Rating:  
About BookBrowse Rankings
Share: 
Buy This Book

Excerpt of Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley
(Page 1 of 2)

 Printer Friendly Excerpt

Chapter 1

THE MORNING AIR still smelled of smoke. Wood ash mainly but there was also the acrid stench of burnt plastic and paint. And even though I knew it couldn’t be true, I thought I caught a whiff of putrid flesh from under the rubble across the street. The hardware store and Bernard’s Stationery Store were both completely gutted. The Gonzalez Market had been looted but only a part of its roof had been scorched. The corner building, however, Lucky Dime Liquors, had been burned to the ground. Manny Massman was down in the rubble with his two sons, kicking the metal fixtures. At one point the middle-aged store owner lowered his head and cried. His sons put their hands on his shoulders.

I understood how he felt. He had everything in that liquor store. His whole life. And now, after a five-day eruption of rage that had been simmering for centuries, he was penniless and destitute.

In his mind he hadn’t done a thing wrong to anyone down in Watts. He had never even thought about calling someone a nigger or boy. But the men and women down around Central and Eighty-sixth Place took everything of Manny’s that they could carry, then smashed and burned the rest.

Four young black men passed in front of the liquor lot. One of them shouted something at the white men.

Manny barked back.

The youths stopped.

The Massman sons stepped forward with their chests out and their mouths full of angry sounds.

It’s starting all over again, I thought. Maybe we’ll be rioting a whole year. Maybe it won’t ever end.

The black men crossed the threshold of the Lucky Dime’s property line.

Stephen Massman bent down to pick up a piece of metal that had once been attached to their counter.

One of the angry youths shoved Martin.

I held my breath.

"Halt!" a man shouted through a megaphone.

A dozen or more soldiers appeared out of nowhere. A black soldier wearing a helmet and camouflage khakis talked to the black men while four white soldiers stood in an arc in front of the store owners. The rest of the troop stood across the property line cutting off the ravaged lot from the street.

Most of the National Guardsmen brandished rifles. A crowd was gathering. My hands clenched into fists so tight that my right forearm went into a spasm.

While I massaged out the knot of pain, the black soldier, a sergeant, calmed the four youths. I could hear his voice but my fourth-story window was too far away for me to make out the words.

I turned away from the scene and fell into the plush blue chair that sat at my desk. For the next hour I just sat there, hearing the sounds of people in the street but not daring to look down.

It had been like that for the past five days: me holding myself in check while South Los Angeles went up in the flames of a race riot; while stores were looted and snipers fired and while men, women, and children cried "Burn, baby, burn!" and "Get whitey!" on every corner familiar to me.

I stayed shut up in my home, in peaceful West L.A., not drinking and not going out with a trunk full of Molotov cocktails.




WHEN I FINALLY roused myself the street down below was full of black people, some venturing out of their homes for the first time since the first night of rioting. Most of them looked stunned.

I went to my office door and out into the hall.

There was the smell of smoke in the building too, but not much. Steinman’s Shoe Repair was the only store that had been torched. That was on the first night, when the fire trucks still braved the hails of sniper bullets. The flames were put out before they could spread.

I went to the far stairwell from my office and down the three flights to Steinman’s side entrance. There was a burnt timber blocking the way. I would have turned around if it weren’t for the voices.

1 2  »

Copyright (c) Little, Brown & Co, 2004. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.


Become a Member
Golden Boy
Editor's Choice
  •  May 23 
  •  May 21 
  •  May 20 
And the Mountains Echoed
Khaled Hosseini

And the Mountains Echoed Jacket

Khaled Hosseini has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations
Helga's Diary
Helga Weiss

Helga's Diary Jacket

The remarkable diary of a young girl who survived the Holocaust—appearing in English for the first time.
Fever
Mary Beth Keane

Fever Jacket

A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Click Here
   Most Recent Blog Entries
Movies Based on Books: Summer 2013 (May - August)
Jewish Young Adult Books That Are Not About The Holocaust
Books to Give This Mother's Day
rss  RSS   rss  subscribe
Recent Reader Reviews
Two Lives by Vikram Seth
Two Lives is a memoir written by international best-selling author, Vikram Seth. In this interesting and engaging book, Seth writes about his great... read more
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Fowler
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight... read more
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on... read more
RSS RSS feed More...  
Most Viewed This Week
1. Wonder
R.J. Palacio
2. A Child Called It
Dave Pelzer
3. The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
4. The Notebook
Nicholas Sparks
5. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
John Boyne
More...
Book Club Recommendations
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
by Jeanette Winterson
Paperback (Mar/13)
Eleanor & Park
by Rainbow Rowell
Hardback (Feb/13)
The House Girl
by Tara Conklin
Paperback (Oct/13)
The Painted Girls
by Cathy Marie Buchanan
Hardback (Jan/13)
More...
First Impressions
Members read and review books often months before they're published. See what they think in First Impressions!
The Last Girl
by Jane Casey
Four Stars            (May/13)
The Sisterhood
by Helen Bryan
Four Stars            (Apr/13)
Golden Boy
by Abigail Tarttelin
4.5 Stars            (May/13)
The Caretaker
by A .X. Ahmad
Four Stars            (May/13)
More...
  Latest BookBrowse News
Judge rules unused Borders gift cards to be worthless (May 23 2013)
Borders owes nothing to holders of roughly $210.5 million of gift cards that had not been used by the time the bookstore chain shut down, a Manhattan federal... Full Story
rss RSS feed More...
 
BookBrowse Poll
Q: Which of these Summer movies based on books would you like to see? (Info on each movie here)
The Great Gatsby
Epic
Man of Steel
World War Z
The Lone Ranger
The Wolverine
R.I.P.D.
Percy Jackson
Paranoia
The Mortal Instruments
Select Any That Apply
Search: Title or Author
Free Newsletters
The Light Between Oceans

Online Book Club
More about
Five Days
Join the discussion!


Win This Book!
On Sal Mal Lane


"Piercingly intelligent and shatter-your-heart profound."

Enter To Win Now!

wordplay
Solve this clue:
"I Y N P O T Solution, Y P O T P"

and be entered
to win....
frame top
New Author
Interviews
Menna van Praag
Erica Brown
Helga Weiss
Kate Morton
frame bottom
HOME Book Submissions | Advertising | Library Subscriptions | Reviewing for BookBrowse | Contact Us