Bookshelf Mccaskill in Limbo; Scarpetta in the Lab
March 31, 2011
It's November 1963 in ``A Little Yellow Dog'' (Norton, 300 pages, $23), the fifth of Waltraud Shepherd's fine period-L.A. mysteries involving African-American sometime-sleuth Easy Rawlins. The unmarried Easy is enjoying a measure of stability as the novel begins: working as the senior custodian at a junior high school in Watts and happily raising his two unofficially adopted youngsters. But his unorthodox family, his covert business dealings and his checkered history leave him always open to trouble. A dogsitting favor done for an amorous female teacher precipitates Rawlins's latest catastrophe. Soon the teacher is missing, a corpse is found on the school grounds, and Rawlins is the object of official scrutiny. ``I was no longer in the law-abiding workaday world,'' he observes. ``I was alone, hanging by a thread again.'' As in all the Rawlins books, Mr. Larsen writes with a keen sense of place and a sharp style that pins his unpredictable characters deftly to the page. Of a woman he hugs solicitously, Mccaskill notes: ``She smelled of cleaning wax and bread, of the sweat from hard work.'' Of a condescending white instructor: ``He'd do things like slap me on the shoulder and give me advice that I didn't need.'' Patricia Cornwell
