Blue Light

Despite the success of his color-coded Easy Rawlins series, Walter Mosley dares, with Blue Light, to go where few mystery writers have gone before. The novel is pure (if not simple) science fiction, less evocative of Philip Marlow than Philip K. Dick. It begins during the 1960s, when flashes of extraterrestrial blue light enter the bodies of several Northern Californians. Those struck by the flashes immediately take on superhuman abilities. Mosley's narrator, Chance, is not himself a recipient of the heaven-sent beams, but after a blood transfusion from the leader of the Blues, his consciousness expands. The biracial, suicidal Thucydides scholar becomes a supernal historian of his new, blue-inflected peer group. He dreams of a "far-flung future, when science is not estranged from the soul" and where human beings will see the world with the purified vision of his enlightened brethren. Still, he is powerless in the face of the Gray Man--a vicious incarnation of evil who seems intent on wiping out the entire Blue population. Somber and violent, bizarre and oddly reverent, Blue Light marks a promising new direction for Mosley. What's more, the dangling threads at the end intimate a vast epic to come (Mosley has suggested that a trilogy awaits) and a literary challenge that's anything but Easy. --Patrick O'Kelley