The Long Fall by Walter Mosley Phoenix, HK$104

Twenty years after Walter Mosley announced himself with Devil in a Blue Dress, his first hero, Easy Rawlins, is no more, bidding adieu in 2008's Blonde Faith. Enter a new hero, 53-year-old Leonid McGill, whose appearance inspires Mosley to a slyly witty opening: 'I'm sorry, Mr ummm...,' the skinny receptionist said. Based in New York (as opposed to Rawlins' California) and working in the present day (not the 1960s), McGill is fresh indeed. A former boxer, he is tough, not averse to dirty money and prone to misanthropy - and not only towards his appalling hurricane of a wife (Katrina) and murderous step-children. McGill's first adventure sees him haunted by his mafia past: 'No one gets out,' one former employer says, 'unless it is on his back.' Having taken a job that he knows smells like rotting flesh simply for the cash, McGill finds himself both hunter and hunted. What makes the prose leap off the page are the sharp observations about race, money and violence in the 21st-century United States. There may be a black president, but: 'It wasn't 2008 everywhere in America.' A return to form by a writer who really never went away.