Luz's plan to escape her husband, Tijuana's brutal narco boss, and rejoin her daughter, who is hidden with relatives in L.A., seems flawless right up to the moment Luz is caught with her hands in the safe and frantically shoots her way out the door. Within hours, she's hired Malone, a surfer gone to seed (and nursing a tragic past), to smuggle her across the border. Luz's husband quickly sets reluctant enforcer Jeronimo on her trail, holding his family hostage as motivation. When Jeronimo foils a crooked Border Patrol agent's robbery of Luz's stolen cash, he and the agent, Thacker, form an uneasy partnership whose unraveling kicks the story into its groove. The story line is certainly familiar, but it's wrapped in enticing layers. Lange pits Luz and Malone against Jeronimo and Thacker, each pair with one soul desperate to save what they love and one self-destructing from the knowledge they've destroyed it. Hope and regret tangle at each turn, and Lange's tours through Tijuana and SoCal evoke a gritty grace. For readers who have already plowed through all the available Don Winslow.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2010 Booklist

It's been six years since Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins drove off a cliff in "Blonde Faith." But time is a flexible concept in the mysteries Walter Mosley writes about a black private eye who works irregular cases in his own neighborhood of Watts and throughout Los Angeles. So it's still 1967 when LITTLE GREEN (Doubleday, $25.95) Opens, and only two months since Easy's accident. Death being just another wobbly notion in this series, Mosley's clearly immortal sleuth emerges from his near-fatal coma and is soon off on a new case. At the urging of his best friend, the violence-prone Raymond (Mouse) Alexander, Easy agrees to search for Evander Noon, known as Little Green, a young black man who wandered up to the Sunset Strip "to see what all the hippies looked like" and went off with a white girl named Ruby. Mosley is never better than when he's got a juicy cut of history to chew on, and the hippie counter-culture of the late '60s perfectly feeds his style. His descriptions of the crash pad where Ruby took Evander during an acid trip are as vivid as any true-life memoir. The bloody laundry bag of cash the boy has somehow acquired proves a smart way to take the narrative into criminal territory, introducing unsavory characters who can shoulder the plot's antisocial behavioral burdens, like shooting people. Easy and Mouse originally burst into this series with guns blazing; but while they still talk the talk, they've mellowed since the old days, and Easy has completed his transformation from tough guy to knight errant. While the relative absence of violence doesn't diminish the novel, the surprisingly pallid language does. A lot of social barriers went down after the Watts riots, and things have changed in Easy's life. ("I was just a witness to the new world.") But the younger generation of liberated blacks, whites and have-it-your-way hippies contribute nothing to the local lingo. Better examples of Mosley's dynamic verbal style are still found in the exchanges between Easy and familiars like Mouse ("That woman hates the water I drink and the sun that shine on my back") and Jackson Blue (a smart man who is "forever thinking, and a thinking man is always in trouble") as well as Mama Jo ("There was no arguing metaphysics with her"), a witch who keeps a raven, a near-feral cat and a couple of armadillos in the cottage where she brews Easy a potent batch of "Gator's Blood" to get him in fighting shape. When you find yourself rooting for the killer in a grisly crime novel, you know you're in the hands of a real writer. Every character in Richard Lange's ANGEL BABY (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) feels like flesh and bone, even the ones who show up just to be killed. The story hangs on the entwined fortunes of Rolando, a Tijuana crime boss respectfully known as el Príncipe; his drug-addled wife, Luz; and Kevin Malone, an American drifter who drives illegals across the Mexican border. The plot explodes after Luz kicks her habit, cleans out her husband's safe, shoots her bodyguards and heads for the border "like a woman on fire." Even for a skilled smuggler like Malone, this is a treacherous journey because el Príncipe has put a ruthless killer, Jerónimo Cruz (street name: el Apache), on their trail. As vividly as the others are drawn, I'd throw them all under the bus for Jerónimo, the morally conflicted killer who becomes the beating heart of the story. "I woke, as it seemed, from a nightmare." Surely that gasp of fear and its sober reflection - "or was it simply my overwrought imagination running away with me?" - has escaped the lips of many a heroine in an 18th-century novel, something thrilling by Mrs. Radcliffe, perhaps. Actually, the line comes from THE ASYLUM (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), John Harwood's clever simulation of a sensation novel. The woman who awakens from a long sleep to find herself in a mental asylum in Cornwall knows herself to be Georgina Ferrars, an unmarried woman who lives with her uncle, a bookseller in the Bloomsbury section of London. But the head of the asylum swears she presented herself as Lucy Ashton (after the tragic heroine of Sir Walter Scott's feverish novel, "The Bride of Lammermoor"), and the uncle in London insists that his niece, Georgina, is at that moment under his roof. Working with a plot drawn from Wilkie Collins's "Woman in White," Harwood puts together a deliciously spooky pastiche of the high and low Gothic traditions and the tender heroines who live and die by them. THE BLACK COUNTRY (Putnam, $26.95) isn't as lurid as "The Yard," Alex Grecian's previous novel about Scotland Yard's original Murder Squad. But the overstuffed plot is still ripe with gory details, like the eyeball a little girl finds in a bird's nest and the leeches a doctor uses to treat those suffering from a mysterious plague. A missing family brings Inspector Walter Day to Blackhampton, a bleak coal town in the English Midlands that's steadily sinking into the tunnels and mine shafts beneath it. Grecian may not know how to hold a meandering plot together, but he has a flair for descriptive drama, so there are strong scenes of giant trees being wrenched from the ground, homes disappearing below the earth and superstitious villagers hiding from the monster that waits in the mines to snatch the unwary. "Our customs are important to us," says an innkeeper who seems to be an authority on Blackhampton's bizarre beliefs. Sometimes they're "what binds people together." Or what makes them craaaazy. Walter Mosley is never better than when he's got a juicy cut of history to chew on - this time the late '60s.

The rambling plot of Lange's second crime novel will remind many of the work of Elmore Leonard. Desperate to escape her life as the caged mistress of violent Mexican drug lord Rolando, Luz plans carefully and waits for her moment. Preparation and ruthlessness let her vanish with a backpack full of money, leaving the corpses of two of Rolando's faithful employees in her wake. By the time Luz is missed, she has arranged to be ferried into the U.S. by Malone, a self-destructive drunk. Enraged, Rolando has "El Apache" retrieved from a Mexican prison and orders the reluctant criminal to use his American citizenship to follow Luz to the States and drag her back to Rolando. As an extra incentive, Rolando makes it clear that El Apache's wife and child will pay the price for failure. More polished than his first novel, This Wicked World, Lange's follow-up marks him as a crime novelist to watch. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A rising star in neonoir, Lange follows up his 2009 novel, This Wicked World, with a sharply calibrated and affecting tale about a young Mexican beauty who will do anything to reclaim the baby daughter she left in Los Angeles. The woman, Luz, survived a hard upbringing in Tijuana only to fall under the control of an abusive Mexican drug lord, Rolando, aka "El Principe." After going to great lengths to convince him she is devoted to him, she sneaks off with a pile of his money, killing two of his household staff with his gun. She hires Malone, an American who makes a living smuggling Mexicans across the border, to drive her to California. They are quickly pursued by Jernimo, a one-time LA gang member whom Rolando springs from a Tijuana prison to bring back Luz, and Thacker, a corrupt U.S. Border Patrol agent. Jernimo, a reformed soul whose wife and daughter are being held by Rolando until he returns with Luz, strikes an uneasy alliance with the slovenly, unreformed Thacker: He'll get Luz, and the border cop will get the money. Malone, who is haunted by memories of seeing his own little girl run over by a car, becomes committed to Luz. The twisting plot thickens when Rolando orders Jernimo to bring back Luz's child as well. Unlike most such stories, this book is driven not by greed or revenge but by parenthood, and Lange doesn't subscribe to the usual moral checks and balances. In all other ways, however, he embraces classic noir in all its violence, bleakness and dark humor. He makes readers care about his flawed characters and appreciate the odds that were stacked against them by the circumstances of their upbringing. A film waiting to happen, this book boasts memorable characters, evocative settings and a suspenseful plot.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.