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Joe King Oliver was one of the NYPD's finest investigators, until, dispatched to arrest a well-heeled car thief, he is framed for assault by his enemies within the NYPD, a charge which lands him in solitary at Rikers Island. A decade later, King is a private detective, running his agency with the help of his teenage daughter, Aja-Denise. Broken by the brutality he suffered and committed in equal measure while behind bars, his work and his daughter are the only light in his solitary life. When he receives a card in the mail from the woman who admits she was paid to frame him those years ago, King realizes that he has no choice.
Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.
In the beginning, Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins and Raymond "Mouse" Alexander were merely two young men hitting the road. In a "borrowed" 1936 Ford, they head for Pariah, Texas on a mission to retrieve money from Mouse's stepfather so he can marry his EttaMae. But on their steamy bayou excursion, Mouse chooses murder as a way out, while Easy's past liaison with EttaMae floats precariously in his memory. Easy and Mouse are coming of age - and everything they ever knew about friendship and about themselves is coming apart at the seams.
Walter Mosley, "one of crime fiction's brightest stars" ( People), returns to mysteries at last! Fearless Jones is a dazzling new thriller, set in 1950s L.A. and featuring the most engaging hero since Easy Rawlins.
In this biography of Chester B. Himes (1909-1984), Lawrence P. Jackson depicts the improbable life of the controversial writer whose novels confront sexuality, racism, and social injustice. In absorbing detail, Jackson explores Chester Himes's middle-class origins, eight years in prison, painful odyssey as a black World War II-era artist, and escape to Europe, where Himes became internationally famous for his Harlem detective series.
His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: LEONID McGILL , PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. It's a name that takes a little explaining, but he's used to it. Ex-boxer, hard drinker, in a business that trades mostly in cash and favors: McGill's an old-school P.I. working a city that's gotten fancy all around him. Fancy or not, he has always managed to get by - keep a roof over the head of his wife and kids, and still manage a little fun on the side - mostly because he's never been above taking a shady job for a quick buck.
Joe King Oliver was one of the NYPD's finest investigators, until, dispatched to arrest a well-heeled car thief, he is framed for assault by his enemies within the NYPD, a charge which lands him in solitary at Rikers Island. A decade later, King is a private detective, running his agency with the help of his teenage daughter, Aja-Denise. Broken by the brutality he suffered and committed in equal measure while behind bars, his work and his daughter are the only light in his solitary life. When he receives a card in the mail from the woman who admits she was paid to frame him those years ago, King realizes that he has no choice.
Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.
In the beginning, Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins and Raymond "Mouse" Alexander were merely two young men hitting the road. In a "borrowed" 1936 Ford, they head for Pariah, Texas on a mission to retrieve money from Mouse's stepfather so he can marry his EttaMae. But on their steamy bayou excursion, Mouse chooses murder as a way out, while Easy's past liaison with EttaMae floats precariously in his memory. Easy and Mouse are coming of age - and everything they ever knew about friendship and about themselves is coming apart at the seams.
Walter Mosley, "one of crime fiction's brightest stars" ( People), returns to mysteries at last! Fearless Jones is a dazzling new thriller, set in 1950s L.A. and featuring the most engaging hero since Easy Rawlins.
In this biography of Chester B. Himes (1909-1984), Lawrence P. Jackson depicts the improbable life of the controversial writer whose novels confront sexuality, racism, and social injustice. In absorbing detail, Jackson explores Chester Himes's middle-class origins, eight years in prison, painful odyssey as a black World War II-era artist, and escape to Europe, where Himes became internationally famous for his Harlem detective series.
His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: LEONID McGILL , PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. It's a name that takes a little explaining, but he's used to it. Ex-boxer, hard drinker, in a business that trades mostly in cash and favors: McGill's an old-school P.I. working a city that's gotten fancy all around him. Fancy or not, he has always managed to get by - keep a roof over the head of his wife and kids, and still manage a little fun on the side - mostly because he's never been above taking a shady job for a quick buck.
Everyone in the small town of Central City, Texas, loves Lou Ford. But behind the platitudes and glad-handing lurks a monster the likes of which few have ever seen. In The Killer Inside Me, Thompson goes where few novelists have dared to go, giving us a pitch-black glimpse into the mind of the American Serial Killer years before Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho.
Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction) rocks this mock bedtime story, capturing a hilarious range of emotions as the voice of a father struggling to get his child to sleep. Go the F**k to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland.
Paris Minton is a man who would just as soon walk away from trouble as stand up to it. But in 1950s Los Angeles, sometimes trouble just comes and gets you. When one of L.A.'s wealthiest women hires Paris and his friend Fearless Jones to find a missing nephew, Paris steps into the a complex and terrifying corner of the black bourgeoisie, and wonders whom he should fear more - the people he's looking for or the people he's working for.
Living in an abandoned apartment building in South-Central L.A., Socrates is one step away from the streets. He bags groceries at the supermarket, collects bottles and cans to recycle for pennies, and feels himself slipping toward invisibility - that is, until he meets 11-year-old Darryl, whose already committed murder and is perilously close to slipping into a life filled with only violence and bloodshed. Socrates' determination to fight for and save Darryl lights his own pathway to self-forgiveness.
We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination - in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, DC....
"Tell me what happened while there's still time," demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate Negro preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. Bliss's history encompasses the joys of young southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker, lovemaking in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals?
Graham Greene’s evocative analysis of the love of self, the love of another, and the love of God is an English classic that has been translated for the stage, the screen, and even the opera house. Academy Award-winning actor Colin Firth ( The King’s Speech, A Single Man) turns in an authentic and stirring performance for this distinguished audio release.
Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman gives an understated and exemplary performance of this satiric look at the unreality of American media culture. Chance, the enigmatic gardener, becomes Chauncey Gardiner after getting hit by a limo belonging to a Wall Street tycoon. The whirlwind that follows brings Chance to his new status of political policy advisor and possible vice presidential candidate. His garden-variety political responses, inspired by television, become heralded as visionary, and he is soon a media icon.
Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folktales is an audiobook benefiting children orphaned and impacted by HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Featured are Gillian Anderson, Benjamin Bratt, LeVar Burton, Ricardo Chavira, Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, Whoopi Goldberg, Sean Hayes, Hugh Jackman, Samuel L. Jackson, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Scarlett Johansson,
Debra Messing, Helen Mirren, Parminder Nagra, Sophie Okonedo, CCH Pounder, Alan Rickman, Blair Underwood, and more.
A resident of one of LA's toughest neighborhoods uses his blistering intellect to solve the crimes the LAPD ignores. East Long Beach. The LAPD is barely keeping up with the neighborhood's high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, lost children unrecovered. But someone from the neighborhood has taken it upon himself to help solve the cases the police can't or won't touch. They call him IQ. He's a loner and a high school dropout, his unassuming nature disguising a relentless determination and a fierce intelligence.
Migration, terrorism, the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism, and a communications revolution: These forces shaped Joseph Conrad's destiny at the dawn of the 20th century. In this brilliant new interpretation of one of the great voices in modern literature, Maya Jasanoff reveals Conrad as a prophet of globalization. As an immigrant from Poland to England, and in travels from Malaya to Congo to the Caribbean, Conrad navigated an interconnected world and captured it in a literary oeuvre of extraordinary depth.
All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop. He is the "King of Manhattan North", a highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of "Da Force". Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest - an elite special unit given carte blanche to fight gangs, drugs, and guns. Every day and every night for the 18 years he's spent on the job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps.
Audie Award Nominee, Fiction, 2013
Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction, Star Wars films), fresh off the success of his uproarious, Audie-nominated performance of the mock children’s book Go the F**k to Sleep, delivers a swaggering, darkly-humored rendering of Chester Himes’ classic first novel.
Himes, described by The Sunday Times as “the greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler”, was no stranger to the world of crime: in his late teens and early 20s, he served 7 years in the Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery, the confession to which was beaten out of him by the police. He delivers the tale of his hopelessly naïve hero suddenly finding himself on the run from a hypocritical and far-from-heroic police force with lurid violence and brutal humor. There is no voice better than Mr. Jackson’s to narrate this hardboiled story of love and crime, set in a richly imagined, mid-20th century Harlem.
An astonishing experience for a suburban white woman, to be transported to Harlem in the 1950s, and Himes (whom I'd heard of, but never read before) made it an unforgettable trip. The story is deliciously convoluted and the characters are perfectly presented, universal figures, yet each utterly one of a kind.
I was a little confused at first, because the lead characters in the series appear more than halfway through the story, and appear as secondary characters. This was Himes's first in the series, so perhaps he didn't realize he would use them again at the time he wrote it.
What set the whole thing sizzling was Samuel L. Jackson's extraordinary, sharp and loving performance, making each character uniquely memorable. I can't say enough about how much his power and enthusiasm got me sucked into the story completely.
12 of 13 people found this review helpful
I'd heard of Chester Himes's Harlem Cycle before, but if it hadn't been for this new "A-List" collection and Samuel L. Jackson's narration, it might have been a while yet before I'd gotten around to this series. Taking place in Harlem, the story revolves around a naive man called Jackson who, when we first meet him, gets taken in by a team of fraudsters who convince him they can "raise" denominations of 10 dollars into 100 dollar bills. There's plenty of humour there, which combines well with the otherwise hardboiled world of gangsterism, drugs and violence. Not for the faint of heart, but deeply satisfying if you like your mysteries served up on the tough side.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
You don't have to be a connoisseur of noir thrillers to enjoy this fast-paced tale of love and greed in 1950s Harlem. Even though my only exposure to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler is via Humphrey Bogart, I could immediately see the parallels between those stories and this one, albeit “A Rage in Harlem” features an all-black cast of characters. And they are every bit as strange and memorable as the Fat Man or Joel Cairo or Vivien Rutledge. A woman who might be good or might be bad, crooked policemen and a junkie/stoolie who dresses up as a nun are just a few of the unforgettable characters whose crazed and misguided actions contribute to the action.
And just when you think you are reading a really well-done, though lightweight, tale of the dumbest con men ever, something happens that turns the book on its head. The action gets real and the writing gets even better. I was listening to this as an audiobook and found the following passage so compelling I rewound the track multiple times just so I could transcribe it. I can’t set it up completely without giving away one of the biggest plot points, but suffice it to say that at this point in the action, the whistle of a passing elevated train goes off and the sound cuts through to the bone:
Shaking the entire tenement city
Shaking the sleeping Black people in their lice-ridden beds
Shaking the ancient bones and the aching muscles and the TB’d lungs and the uneasy fetuses of unwedded girls
Shaking the plaster from ceilings, mortar from between the bricks of building walls
Shaking the rats between the walls
Shaking the cockroaches crawling over kitchen sinks and leftover food
Shaking the sleeping flies hibernating in lumps like bees behind the casings of the windows
Shaking the fat blood-filled bed bugs crawling over Black skin
Shaking the fleas, making them hop
Shaking the sleeping dogs in their filthy pallets
Shaking the sleeping cats
Shaking the clogged toilets, loosening the filth
This is a very gifted writer who deserves to be better known. There is just enough detail in the descriptions to set the scenes, lots of lines that made me laugh out loud (a taxi driver whose cab has just been commandeered is described as being so alarmed “even the back of his head looked scared”) and plenty of over-the-top, blackly humorous violence to make Quinton Tarantino happy. All of that given a darkly, hysterically fantastic reading by Samuel L. Jackson on the Audible audiobook version adds up to one helluva good listen.
27 of 31 people found this review helpful
Would you consider the audio edition of A Rage in Harlem to be better than the print version?
Absolutely.
What does Samuel L. Jackson bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Samuel L. Jackson brings the characters alive with the many voices he affects for the different characters. My favorite voice was the character of Goldie. The reading really painted the story in my mind as I listened to it.
Any additional comments?
The story itself is full of crazy action, from start to finish. Some of the action just gets ridiculous in places, although for the time period the story was set in perhaps the action is all appropriate. It is not possible to be more specific without handing out spoilers. Hence only giving the story a 4 stars, since some of the "ridiculous" bordered on "unbeleiveable". Samuel L. Jackson lent an authenticity to the narration, in both voicing and accent, that brought the text and characters to life.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful
Chester Himes is an unappreciated master of noir fiction. His writing sings and Samuel L. Jackson gets the tune exactly right. The story is entertaining, characters are exceptionally well drawn and the violence is as brutal as it is unexpected. Give it a try.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
If you could sum up A Rage in Harlem in three words, what would they be?
This was a great book. The story was attention-grabbing and enjoyable. Samuel L. Jackson was great. He brought life to the characters and that kept me wanting more.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
What did you love best about A Rage in Harlem?
I loved the way the book made me feel like I was in the story. I felt as if I could interrupt any of the characters to ask them a question. I felt like I was in the car chases as well as needing to duck when Grave Digger starts shooting in the dark. The book has so much energy that I would feel exhausted for Jackson playing all of these emotionally charged characters.
What was one of the most memorable moments of A Rage in Harlem?
The most memorable moment of the story was when Jackson finds his brother's body and can't let on who he is.
What about Samuel L. Jackson’s performance did you like?
I loved the way he could change from one character to another in the many heated conversations. It made you feel like you were actually listening to three, four or five different people and not just the one voice of Samuel Jackson.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
It made me both laugh and cry. Jackson sister as Sister Gabrielle was both funny and sad as the brother cons people for money to support a drug habit. It was emotional when he/she is killed so violently. The book brought the reality of living in a city such as Harlem and how people have to husle to survive.
Any additional comments?
I don't think I could read this book myself and get half as much out of it as I did listening to the dynamic voices of characters that Samuel Jackson brings to life!! BRAVO!!! Hope to find more book by him in this format.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful
What did you love best about A Rage in Harlem?
Samuel L Jackson's performance.
What did you like best about this story?
The story is mostly about confidence games, the old con and greed. Quite entertaining.
What about Samuel L. Jackson’s performance did you like?
I love hearing SLJ swear. Made me laugh a few times. Reminds me of Snakes on a Plane.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?
?
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
Would you consider the audio edition of A Rage in Harlem to be better than the print version?
Jackson brings the characters to life with his narration. Combined with an excellent story, it makes a first rate listen.
Did the plot keep you on the edge of your seat? How?
Interesting characters and plot line keep the story interesting and hurtling forward.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
If you could sum up A Rage in Harlem in three words, what would they be?
The story was fun and fast paced from a different era. Samuel L. Jackson makes the book come to life with great infections.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful