all the other reviewers really liked this one. i couldn't understand how it got published. so much detail about his personal life(vomit). his son but i don't remember if it's his biological son is ready to kill someone and all this ties up with a case the hero is working on(maybe). so many characters, insane asylums, rich people, gyms. i couldn't keep it all straight. i listened to it and found the narrator didn't help. at the end i had no idea what it was all about. i usually like mosley ( )

I was like a man, shovel in hand, finding himself standing in a freshly dug grave but with no memory of having dug it. I stayed there because at least if you’ve hit bottom you had no farther to fall. - from The Long Fall -

Leonid McGill is a man of contradictions. He has spent much of his life working for criminals as a Private Investigator, immersing himself in the dangerous world of organized crime. But he has a conscience and now wants to live a different life – one where people don’t get killed just because he can locate them. He’s an ex-boxer who appreciates fine art. He’s a no-nonsense, tough guy with a soft spot for his teenage son and a commitment to a marriage that doesn’t work. Sardonic, oddly sensitive, and matter-of-fact, it is Leonid McGill who narrates Walter Mosley’s newest novel The Long Fall.

It becomes clear from the early pages of The Long Fall that McGill has his hands full with his marriage, his errant kids, and a new job which ends up being a little different than he expected.

I still had a family that looked to me for their sustenance. My wife didn’t love me and the two out of three grown and nearly grown children were not of my blood. But none of that mattered. I had a a job to do, and more than one debt to pay. – from The Long Fall -

Mosley writes in a direct way, revealing his protagonist as a man who although willing to do what it takes to get the job done, also struggles with the choices in his life and realizes he must eventually face his demons. I did not love Leonid McGill, but he eventually grew on me. There are few characters in the book who resonated with me – McGill’s children are a mess, his landlady (who wants to be his lover) is superficially drawn, his wife is pathetic, the men who McGill “works” with are cold-blooded killers for the most part, and even his friends are not people with whom I would enjoy an evening. Because of this, I struggled a bit with this novel. I admit, I want to love the characters I spend my time with…and most of Mosley’s characters seem to have been scrapped up from the worst dregs of society.

Despite this flaw (for me) in the novel, the plot itself is interesting enough. Written like a hard-boiled type mystery, Mosley lays out a mess of a plot, and then gradually untangles it. The narrative style – conversational, direct, rapid-fire – works for the novel. The book reminds me of those old 1940s movies which start out with a guy, feet up on the desk and a curl of cigarette smoke wafting to the ceiling, talking about one dark and lonely night.

The Long Fall is the first in a planned series of mysteries featuring McGill so readers who want more will get their wish. Mystery readers who like their books hard-boiled and who want a flawed character who eventually redeems himself, will enjoy The Long Fall. ( )

Have I ever mentioned that Walter Mosley is one of my very favorite authors (crime fiction and otherwise) in the whole world? So when THE LONG FALL came out, needless to say I felt compelled to try this first book in his new Leonid McGill series set in New York City, instead of the LA of Easy Rawlins and Paris Minton.

Among the many things I enjoyed about this book was meeting Leonid McGill, another one of Mosley's flawed, but likable, protagonists, haunted by terrible (as in criminal) things he's done in the past, but seeking redemption and something approaching a semi-normal life. Which is to say that, like a lot of Mosley protagonists, McGill just wants to be left alone to live his life and do his work without worrying that cops or thugs (interchangeable characters in his novels, at times) aren't breaking his door down.

That can't happen, of course. Because then there'd be no story to tell. So, it all starts when McGill is hired to find four men. He's been given their "street names"--now he has to hunt down the real people and tell his client, Ambrose Thurman, who and where they are. However, things get a bit weird when the four men start, um, being killed.

And Thurman isn't exactly who he seems to be, either.

Meanwhile, Mosley gets two other plot threads going. (He's good at that.) One involves finding A Mann (yeah, that's his name--A Mann) for a disreputable fellow from McGill's checkered past. The other involves a potentially tragic plan McGill's step-son has conceived.

Two of Mosley's favorite themes and plot devices come into play here. One is the racially-mixed--and, in this case, slightly dysfunctional--family. Katrina (interesting name choice) is McGill's Scandinavian wife. McGill is black, as Mosley's protags always are. She and McGill seem to have fallen out of love, but hang together nonetheless. Not entirely clear why. Inertia? Katrina's great cooking? (McGill brings up her cooking a lot.)

Anyway, there's a lot of stuff going on here. And a WHOLE lot of characters to keep track of. Each time I picked up the book, I'd find myself asking, "Okay, where is McGill now? Albany or New York? And who's the guy he's talking to? And what's going on?"

That brings me to the second Mosley trademark: the deadly sidekick. He makes an appearance in this book as the character Hush. Great name. Great character, too. Hush is to McGill as Mouse is to Easy Rawlins or Fearless is to Paris Minton. (You Mosley readers know what I'm saying.) He does what needs to be done, helping to resolve matters without McGill getting his hands terribly dirty in the process.

As usual, Mosley's writing is so good, I find myself almost green with envy at his word choices. . . .

The entire review is on my blog, The Book Grrl, at http://thebookgrrl.blogspot.com/2009/... ( )

New character, new series and promises to be as good as Easy Rawlins early books ( )

I liked the mystery and Mosley is easy to read but I thought he stopped the flow of the story too often while he detailed some of Leonid's backstory. I think he could have saved some of the details for the next book in the series. ( )