Walter Mosley by Fear Itself

Author:Fear Itself
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Los Angeles (Calif.), Private investigators, Historical fiction, Mystery & Detective, Fiction, Mystery fiction, Historical, Thrillers
Publisher: Warner Trade Publishing
Published: 2004-07-01T05:00:00+00:00

I TURNED ON A SMALL LAMP and pulled a burgundy hassock up to the double shelf.

Most of the books were romances and westerns. There were a few magazines stacked on the bottom shelf, Life and Men at War made up the most of them. A lot of the books were old and smelled of decaying paper. I loved that smell. Ever since I was a child that odor meant excitement and knowledge.

I found one interesting novel written by a man with the unlikely name of Amos Amso. The book was called Night Man. It was the story of a man who conducted his life only at night. He slept in the daytime and kept all of the shades and curtains in his house tightly drawn during the daylight hours. He’d had many jobs. Once he worked for the phone company as an emergency technician, then as an operator. Later he got a job as a cook in a twenty-four-hour restaurant in a downtown San Francisco hotel. Whenever any employer tried to change his position to some hour that bordered on morning or sunset, he’d quit and look for something else. He rarely saw his family or made professional appointments. He hired a man to impersonate him when he had to show up for important meetings that could only be scheduled during the day. When he wasn’t working, he took long walks in the wee hours, noting the furtive and feral life that lived beyond the hell of the sun.

Finally the main character, who was also called Amos, came across a woman who was attempting to throw herself off of the Golden Gate Bridge in the early hours of the morning. He saved her and talked to her. He convinced her that her life was worth living. Her name was Crystal Limmer and she was a painter, a watercolorist.

That was about the first hundred and fifty pages of the book. I’m a fast reader, but I never finish a book if I don’t see a reason for it. Mr. Amso’s book would either have the hero being pulled out of darkness by this bright gem of a woman or he would lose himself to a gloom he’d never known before finding love. Either way I wasn’t interested, so I put the book back on the shelf.

At least I tried to return it. The books had been packed so tightly that Night Man no longer fit in the space I took it from. I pride myself in organizing space on bookshelves, so I took out a few other books in order to accommodate the full complement.

I removed three Zane Grey westerns. But before I could do anything else, I noticed that there was something behind the first row of books. The shelves were quite a bit deeper than I thought. They were actually set deep into the wall. There was a good six inches of space behind the first row of books.

There was another book back there. A thick book with a hard leather cover that had an embossed design but no writing on it.

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