Karma

From the author of the award winning Devil in a Blue Dress comes a short story rife with mystery and suspense, an enthralling introduction to the complex protagonist Leonid McGill.

When Walter Mosley published the first Leonid McGill novel, The Long Fall—the acclaimed New York Times bestseller that is now being developed as a series for HBO—it was clear that this new hero was a man with a past.

He was a private investigator who had "decided to go from crooked to slightly bent," turning down the shady but lucrative work that New York's thugs and mobsters had long brought to his door.

In Karma, Walter Mosley tells us the story of the moment McGill decided to change his ways, when a seemingly classic femme fatale forced him to confront the reality of his life of corruption and betrayal.

It was the culmination of a dark and tragic case that reached back through McGill's entire career, plumbing the full, complex history of the soul-scarred figure now hailed as "a poignantly real character . . . [and] a more than worthy successor to Philip Marlowe."

Originally published in Otto Penzler's anthology Dangerous Women, Karma was included in Best American Mystery Stories 2006, edited by Scott Turow.