There's nothing like a religious m...

There's nothing like a religious mystery for summer reading, and this summer there are pair whodunits that fit the bill, with an inherent stake of compelling contrasts. Both are events of popular series, one volume is set in the East and single in the West. In individual the hero is a male gumshoe while the other is a young female. Walter Mosley's eighth novel in the Easy Rawlins series, LITTLE SCARLET (Little, Brown and Company, $2495) and CNBC President and CEO Pamela Thomas-Graham's ORANGE CRUSHED: AN IVY LEAGUE MYSTERY (Simon & Schuster, $24) the couple beguile the reader. In Mosley's work it's the hot summer of the 1965 Watts riots. The air is still heavy with ashes when a redheaded woman named Little Scarlet is construct murdered in her home. A White man was seen in the neighborhood Did he kill her? single Easy Rawlins, Watt's unofficial private detective, can find public Thomas-Graham returns with her popular heroine Nikki Chase in a brisk and atmospheric mystery wager in Princeton and Cambridge. The heroine awakens to a campus fire that has quenched the planned building for the campus' Black Studies department. The material part of her mentor is set up inside. The Princeton police say his death is an accident, if it be not that Nikki's investigation uncovers information that will asylum not only the Princeton campus, still Harvard as well. The part has already been optioned for a feature film starring Morgan Freeman.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Johnson Publishing Co

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group