Since his debut with "Devil in a Blue Dress" in 1990, Walter Mosley has created some of the most memorable characters in modern crime fiction: Easy Rawlins, Socrates Fortlow, Paris Minton and Fearless Jones. And he has used the imagined lives of these four proud, black men to explore the turbulent racial history of Los Angeles in the three decades following the Second World War.

Together, the 17 books in Mosley's LA saga comprise an extraordinary body of work. Expertly written and unfailingly entertaining, they are also rich with insights about the separate but parallel lives of black and white Americans — and the misunderstandings and violence that so often have occurred when these two worlds have collided.

But when Mosley killed Rawlins off in a car accident at the conclusion of "Blonde Faith" (2007), he hinted that his work was heading in a new direction.

In "The Long Fall," the author introduces us to Leonid T. McGill, a 53-year-old black man who has long earned a living working as private detective for the mob. The story is set not in postwar Los Angeles but in contemporary New York, the city that has been Mosley's home for the last 30 years.

At the dawn of the Obama era, the overt racism that tormented Rawlins and his friends in Los Angeles is out of fashion. Even the white cop who vows to put McGill behind bars does so not out of racial hatred but because he believes McGill is up to no good. It's not the country's racial history, but McGill's own personal history, that causes him all kinds of trouble.

LT, as he prefers to be called, is the son of Tolstoy McGill, a member of the Communist Party who abandoned his family when his son was just a boy. Short but powerfully built, LT was a boxer before becoming an investigator for the worst sort of people. He lives with his unfaithful white wife and their three children, only one of whom McGill sired.

As the story opens, LT is feeling remorse about the way he has lived his life and the people he has hurt. He vows to reform, which for him means going "from crooked to only slightly bent".

So he's hesitant when a private detective from Albany offers him too much money to help locate four young men. Still, there's nothing obviously illegal about the offer, and LT's rent is over due, so he takes the job. He knows he's made a mistake when the young men he locates — and the private detective who hired him to find them — start turning up dead.

As if that weren't trouble enough, LT's life fills with more complications: A face from the past, Tony "The Suit" Towers, wants LT to track down a missing mob accountant and won't take no for an answer; two killers with two different motives are gunning for LT; and he discovers that his favorite son, 16-year-old Twilliam, is plotting a murder of his own.

Mosley keeps the action fast-paced right to the end.

LT, who made his first appearance in the short story "Karma" in 2006, is neither as warm as Easy Rawlins nor as intimidating as Fearless Jones. He is a modern family man, and a private detective with a past and a conscience.

"The Long Fall" is subtitled "The first Leonard McGill Mystery", so LT is likely to be with us for a long time. Mosley says he expects to write up to ten books in the series, and readers of the first will find themselves looking forward to the next one.