"Fear Of the Dark" by Walter Mosley. Not Easy Rawlins, this time it's Fearless Jones, but a similar milieu the black LA neighbourhoods in the mid 50's.
Aah, one of my favourite contemporary writers. He can do anything (literary novels, crime, sf etc.), always has something important to say, but he still manages to make it readable.
I've just finished reading Banana Yoshimoto's
Hardboiled & Hard Luck - two deceptively simple stories of love and loss. She was a breath of fresh air on the Japanese scene some twenty years ago, and she's still writing the kind of beautiful novellas where not a word is wasted. Anyone interested should read her first novel
Kitchen and her last one
Goodbye, Tsugumi in particular...
In complete contrast, I am now reading Joe Haldeman's
All My Sins Remembered, which has a great premise (ethical guy who wants to be a diplomatic is, unknown to him, trained through hypnosis to be an assassin) but doesn't really seem to make enough of this, instead being a series of rather standard and naively-written alien contact stories...