Ghalen by Walter Mosley

Published by Amistad on May 26, 2026

Walter Mosley is on my laminated list of America's three best crime novelists. Ghalen isn’t a crime novel, but Mosley brings the same sense of time and place, deep characterization, and storytelling ability to this coming-of-age story. Mosley is not just one of America’s best crime novelists; he’s one of the country’s best writers.

The story begins when Jamilah Fenestra meets Robert Horton at a farmer’s market in Santa Monica. Jamilah is studying for a PhD and an M.D. Robert works in a vegan restaurant and aspires to own a restaurant that serves healing foods. Robert explains that his mother has been in the crazy house since shooting a boyfriend. Robert’s “mother wasn’t even sure of who his father was. It was between two guys named William and one named Talib.” Jamilah and Robert are obviously from different worlds, but Robert — who has no problem finding women who want to shag — is drawn to Jamilah because she makes him feel brave.

Jamilah and Robert fall in love and seem to have an ideal relationship, but Jamilah’s mother Pristine instantly dislikes Robert. Because he is slow and deliberate when he answers her questions, she describes him using the R-word.

The extent to which Robert is developmentally disabled is unclear. He thrives in a familiar routine but doesn’t cope well with anything new. He didn’t excel in school because “I can’t know something unless I see it. I have to see and touch things in order to learn ’em.”

Jamilah sees beyond Robert’s limitations. She loves him for his decency and for how he makes her feel. She admires his ability to see the world as it is rather than seeing what he wants to see. “She had accepted him for what he was before she even knew what he was.” It doesn’t hurt that Robert is exceptionally good in the sack.

The first quarter of the novel develops an unusual and exceptionally moving love story, but it is not a story that is free from pain. Unlike Jamilah, Pristine is never willing to accept Robert. After Jamilah becomes pregnant and marries Robert, Pristine announces that she wants Jamilah “out of my house, out of my life, out of my will, out of everything.”

Robert and Jamilah name their son Ghalen Romeo Horton. The rest of the novel follows Ghalen’s life through his late teens. Although Ghalen is an excellent student, he finds himself playing the role of primary caregiver for his father during much of his young life. When others disparage his father’s lack of intelligence, Ghalen retorts that he’s “smarter than most people when it comes to what’s right and what’s not right.” That might be the most important form of intelligence, one that too many "smart" people lack.

The family drama is altered by the arrival of Night Farr, Ghalen’s grandfather on his mother’s side. The family thought that Night died in the Vietnam War, but Night made a simple life for himself in Vietnam before returning to America. He stayed with a young Vietnamese woman because “it felt like the first time ever that somebody didn’t treat me like a empty bag of rice.” The importance of treating people with respect and of feeling respected is a theme in many of Mosley’s novels.

The story includes moments that will be familiar to Mosley’s fans, including a pivotal scene in which Robert sustains a head injury after being tackled by the police because he’s walking to work through a white neighborhood at three in the morning. Robert easily loses focus after his brain is injured, reinforcing Ghalen’s commitment to caring for his father.

Ghalen experiences the usual conflicts that kids endure as they grow up, although his teenage sex life might be healthier than most. He’s long had a thing for his childhood friend Lovely but gets in trouble with his childhood friend Bruno when Lovely becomes Bruno’s girlfriend. An encounter with Bruno leaves Ghalen with a brain injury of his own. The injury makes him prone to moments of darkness and a rage that he struggles to control.

Freedom is one of the novel’s strongest themes. Freedom from captivity imposed by others and by ourselves. “I guess it always seems like you’re locked in somewhere,” Ghalen says — a job or a schedule or a prison cell. When we’re locked into a relationship or responsibilities that we can’t shirk, we need to understand that we have the freedom to love and that choosing love represents freedom’s embrace, not its surrender.

Another theme is the duality of human nature. Head injuries might unlock the impulse to commit violent acts but only because the potential for violence is there to unlock. People blend good and evil in their lives. They might not recognize their own evil. Those who do may struggle to overcome it, but they are really working to overcome bad parenting, the hardships of poverty, trauma, or other forces that shaped their lives in ways they aren’t equipped to understand.

The subculture of the street is another theme that will be familiar to Mosley’s fans. As Robert explains, “when the street gets ahold’a you it just, it just twists you up inside till your heart is all strangled up with your gut.”

The harm caused by judging people we don’t know might be the story’s most powerful theme. Mosley usually illustrates that harm in the context of racial stereotypes, but Ghalen explores the evil of seeing others as “simple” — of using the R-word to describe them — despite their ability to enrich the world with their love.

The story takes a dark turn but has a hopeful ending. Like all lives, Ghalen’s might go in many directions, depending on the choices he makes. He needs to get a handle on his unpredictable impulses toward violence. But Ghalen has the support of caring friends and family (if you don’t count Pristine). He learns the importance of making his own choices, of pursuing an education on his own terms and in his own time, rather than “getting a degree that is there to make you seem like everybody else. It’s a fancy way of learning how to do what people tell you to do.” The path Ghalen will eventually choose is unclear (the novel ends before he reaches adulthood), but Mosley makes clear that children can be empowered to overcome hardship when they are raised with love.

RECOMMENDED

Gray Dawn by Walter Mosley

Published by Mulholland Books on September 16, 2025

Walter Mosley is as dependable as any writer in the crime fiction business. That’s why he has a laminated spot in my list of the top three crime novelists.

Nearly every character who has played an important role in the Easy Rawlins series — at least, those who are still alive — makes an appearance in Gray Dawn: Mouse, Fearless Jones, Charcoal Joe, Jackson and Jewelle Blue, Melvin Suggs, Milo Sweet, and probably a dozen more. As if Easy’s adopted son Jesus and adopted daughter Feather weren’t enough to round out the cast, Mosley adds another member to Easy’s family (one he didn’t know existed), adds another woman who shows interest in him, and reunites Easy with an old lover.

The main story begins when Santangelo Burris hires Easy to find Lutisha James. Burris claims that Lutisha is his aunt and that his mother wants to get in touch with her. As Easy senses, there is more to the story than Burris has revealed.

Easy soon learns that Lutisha is well known among his less savory colleagues. She is, in fact, well known to legendary blues artists, one of whom wrote some lyrics about her (“Lutisha James had Satan’s son / If you see her comin’ duck down quick / Before you hear that thunderin’ gun”). Apart from being dangerous, she has an affinity for poker and a history of working in the numbers racket. Those leads send Easy into parts of LA that prudent people might want to avoid.

The story is set in the early 1970s. As Mosley explains in an introduction, “Easy, and his friends, exist to testify about a volatile time in Black, and therefore American, history.” A sense of danger permeates the novel, heightened by racial tension. When a white security guard questions Easy, one wrong move might cause the guard to invent an excuse for murder. It doesn’t matter that Easy is financially successful, having made some smart investments in real estate. “All I’d seen and experienced, everything I had built, meant nothing up against the lying word of this high school dropout rent-a-cop.”

A subplot involves Easy’s assistant Niska, a detective in training who has agreed to help a female college student find the man who “wheedled his way” into her life so he could steal her money. Niska is amazed by her client’s reaction when she finds the man. Easy has seen it all before.

A third subplot begins when Easy learns that his son Jesus is in trouble with the police for transporting loads of marijuana on his boat. The cops think Jesus should be working for them rather than engaging in his own business.

Easy has a nice date with a woman that ends with a kiss. Just after the date, a final subplot takes shape in the pleasant form of a former lover named Amethystine who returns to Easy’s life. Amethystine is a killer but Easy doesn’t hold that against her. He says: “I had been wanting to see her every day since the day I told her that I’d never see her again.” After they shag, he reflects on the day: “I had kissed one woman and made love to another. My life was going well, quite well.” It’s good to be Easy if you don’t count the times when someone is trying to kill him.

A bomb drops about two-thirds of the way into the story. It’s the kind of bomb that might shatter Easy’s life. I won’t reveal it, but readers who regard Easy as a companionable friend won’t want to miss the changes made to Easy’s life in Gray Dawn.

The main plot and Niska’s subplot reach satisfactory resolutions. Mosley is a throwback to the days when crime fiction writers invented credible plots and substituted thought for mindless action. The novel moves quickly but Mosley takes the time to add flesh to his characters and nuance to Easy’s perception of the world.

Mosley fans know that the man is a born storyteller and that his prose is about as good as modern crime fiction gets. If you haven’t read an Easy Rawlins novel, starting with this one might be a reasonable plan, but you should treat yourself by starting at the beginning and reading them all.

RECOMMENDED

Touched by Walter Mosley

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on October 10, 2023

Walter Mosley has a laminated spot on my list of three favorite crime writers. When he strays from crime fiction, I’m less enthused about his novels. Touched is a horror novel. It’s based on a puzzling concept and isn’t nearly as compelling as his Easy Rawlins novels, but Mosley has mastered the art of holding a reader’s interest.

Martin Just is arrested for exposing himself, naked and erect, to a distant nine-year-old girl while he is standing on the second-floor deck of his home. His wife believes he was sleepwalking. Martin knows he was awake but isn’t sure how he came to be on the porch — or, for that matter, back on Earth.

Martin believes he is one of 107 people who were taken from Earth, trained for a millennium, and returned to change the Earth in 107 different ways. A pile of glowing blue rocks told him that mankind will reach a state of interstellar domination that will result in oblivion, ending all existence — not just on insignificant Earth, but throughout the entire universe. Martin woke up with that knowledge and with an erection. That’s a lot for Martin to process.

At least some of the 107 have made it their mission to wipe out humanity. Martin takes a different approach. Martin is the Cure. Or the Antibody. Sometimes he’s called the Antibody Cure. Martin wants to save the universe by fixing humanity rather than destroying it. This perspective puts him in conflict with the destroyers.

Maybe this was all a dream. Maybe Martin is delusional. But Martin believes that his newfound beliefs are true. The reader will agree with that conclusion before the novel reaches its midway point because the story is better if Martin is really waging a war against those of the 107 who want to end human life. Still, Martin’s explanation of his return to Earth and his newly split personality (he’s sharing his mind with a more toxic version of himself he calls Temple) never rises much above incoherent babble. In fact, the notion of choosing and training 107 humans to save the universe by fighting each other makes very little sense. At the very least, it needed further development.

Martin is Black. Before the battle with the destroyers begins, Martin needs to deal with the police, who decide to punish him for exposing himself on his deck. They place Martin in a cell with a large and brutal white supremacist who decides to strangle him. When Martin wakes up, he discovers that he is charged with murdering his cellmate. Fortunately, there were no witnesses and he likely acted in self-defense, so a judge releases him on bail. Mosley’s confidence in the judicial system is surprising, given that Mosley is far from naïve.

As Martin tries to explain all this to his wife, he realizes that he has physically changed. He feels younger. He’s stronger and more vigorous. Thanks to Temple, he’s become a sexual dynamo. That change pleases his wife (Martin feels a bit jealous that she loves shagging Temple) but she also seems to be changed by his touch. His wife takes steps to change his two children, making them soldiers in his war. This leads to a minor side story about his wife’s former (and possibly not so former) lover, but like most of the novel, that story is essentially thrown away before it develops into a significant subplot.

Mayhem ensues as Martin and his small army of reformed criminals (plus his family) battle a reincarnated killer, a demon dog, and a powerful member of the 107. That battle is essentially the heart of the novel, but it’s over too quickly to amount to much, given Temple’s ability as a warrior.

With no disrespect intended — again, I love Walter Mosley — the story seems a bit silly. Why did Mosley write it? I suppose Touched is a contemplation of death. Mosley’s point seems to be that death never defeats life. Everyone dies but in a universe that has existed for billions of years and will continue for billions more, the death of an individual life on a single planet isn’t all that significant. Death is “merely a prop for life, a yardstick that measured our advance.” It might be comforting to hold onto that thought until death prevents us from thinking. In any event, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the tiny specks we are in the vastness of space and time. A secondary lesson (and one familiar to fans of Mosley's work as a crime novelist) is that bullies can be defeated by showing them how “small and insignificant” they are.

Touched isn’t as substantial as Mosley’s crime fiction but it might appeal to horror fans who are satisfied with a bare-bones story. I recommend it to that limited audience with the caveat that readers looking for Mosley at his best are likely to be disappointed.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Blood Grove by Walter Mosley

Published by Mulholland Books on February 2, 2021

Walter Mosley has a permanent position on my list of three favorite crime novelists. He secured that position with intelligent prose, credible plots, and complex characterizations. Add compassion and humanity, and you've got a storyteller who rises about the crowd. All of those elements combine in Mosley’s most recent Easy Rawlins novel.

Blood Grove takes place in 1969, a century after the Civil War ended “but the remnants could still be felt, still killed over on any street corner in the country.” Easy has earned the respect of a few members of the LAPD; many others would be happy to shoot him because of his skin color.

Easy is enjoying some alone time in his office when a man named Craig Killian walks in. Killian thinks he might have stabbed a man to death. He was in an orange grove where he saw a woman tied to a tree. He also saw a man holding a knife. Killian fought him and eventually realized that the knife was deep in the man’s chest. He lost consciousness after battling the man and, when he woke up, the man and woman were gone.

Killian endured some trauma in Vietnam and suffers from what would now be diagnosed as PTSD, but he doesn’t seem delusional. He wants to know what he might have done. He believes the woman called the man Alonzo. Since Alonzo was black, someone suggested to Killian that Easy might be in a good position to ask around and learn Alonzo’s fate.

Killian’s story is missing some pieces but Easy is a soft touch for damaged veterans. He takes the case, embarking on a twisting plot involving mistaken and multiple identities. His investigation leads him to a sex club, a bank heist, an embezzler, more murders, and multiple encounters with dangerous people. Along the way, Easy enlists the services of his own dangerous people, including series regular Raymond “Mouse” Alexander.

Other series regulars, including Jackson Blue and his wife Jewelle, make appearances, Jackson having made a career change that gives him the self-confidence he always lacked. Not lacking in self-confidence is Easy’s adopted daughter Feather, who meets her blood uncle for the first time, a hippy who must overcome Easy’s protective skepticism.

What is there to say about a new Easy Rawlins novel? Mosley has developed Easy and the secondary characters in such depth over the years that, at this point, only the plot details distinguish one novel from the next. And the plots are always good. Easy pounds the pavement, makes civilized inquiries, and calls in favors while waiting for the moment when a white cop decides to put him down. Through persistence and deduction, he moves closer to the truth a step at a time. Like every Easy Rawlins novel, Blood Grove is a treat for fans of intelligent crime fiction.

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The Awkward Black Man by Walter Mosley

Published by Grove Press on September 15, 2020

Walter Mosley is known for crime fiction that has the depth, complexity, and prose style of literary novels. The protagonist in the story “Haunted” submitted 1,000 stories to literary journals. Each was rejected because of its “genre” themes. Perhaps Mosley wrote that story as a reminder that fiction of literary quality can still engage themes that are common to genre fiction. Mosley’s fans (and fans of other extraordinary writers of genre fiction) understand that a literary work does not cease to be literary because its characters are not upper middle-class New Yorkers who spend their time regretting failed marriages while doing little to interest readers who are not upper middle-class New Yorkers in failed marriages.

Notwithstanding Mosley’s excellence as a writer of crime fiction, most of the stories in this collection do not fit within a genre. These are stories of life. The protagonists are educated black men of varying ages. Some work for banks or insurance companies. Others are professors. They are awkward for many reasons. The younger ones are uncertain of how they might fit into the world. The older ones don’t know how to talk to women or bosses. Some are insecure. One feels “sure that any woman who showed any interest in me were the ones who had given up, deciding that they’d never get the kind of man they’d really wanted.” When a woman does seem to take an interest in that character, she turns out to be a thief.

Many of the men have been betrayed by women in various ways, although the long-married salesman in “The Letter” is getting over the end of his third affair. Some of the men are going through a crisis, wondering about their relationships or the purpose of their lives. They often question themselves, wonder about the choices they made. Sometimes they question their faith in humanity.

Some of the men struggle with their place in a society that holds them apart. They are burdened by the complexity of life, incapable of glib or superficial responses to social or workplace situations. A man who feels “stuck” has two therapists and lies to them both.

The men are often philosophers, some drawing on the classics and others on the street to inform a perspective on purpose and meaning. Some of the men decide it is time to make a break from the past and to begin a new life. One protagonist, pondering the concept of equilibrium and balance, renounces everything material and, like a Buddhist monk, becomes a beggar during an interval in his search for identity. Another quits his job, walking away from a retirement package, and invites a woman he barely knows to join him as he travels to Italy. Yet another resists a promotion because he wonders whether the position will have a corrupting influence on his life.

Only a couple of stories in this collection might be a comfortable fit within genre fiction. “The Sin of Dreams” involves a murder trial, but it flirts with a common science fiction theme by imaging the transfer of data from a brain to digital storage.  The story asks whether a human soul exists independently of memories and explores the ramifications of replacing natural with synthetic bodies. The writer in “Haunted” dies angry and unpublished. He returns as a ghost to pay for his “small-minded, selfish ways.” It takes years of death to learn how to let go of the anger that consumed him in life.

Mosley’s stories dig into the heart of life. They are heartwarming and heartbreaking. Some of the protagonists have suffered a run of hard luck. Some have fathers who are killers or brawlers. Some of the men might have responded to adversity with alcohol or silence. They might lose hope for a while, but in the end, they might find a reserve of strength that helps them carry on.

Each story in this collection is thought-provoking and each reflects the intelligence and compassion that is emblematic of Mosley’s fiction. Mosley drills a deep hole into the interior of his characters to find the humanity that we have so much trouble discovering within ourselves. Decency is a common theme in the stories. Even when they disappoint themselves, characters generally behave decently because that’s how they are wired. Most of the men refuse to be anything less than caring or understanding when the chips are down, no matter how indecently they are treated by others. These awkward black men are, on the whole, models for all men as they confront the awkwardness of living.

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