Walter Mosley and his new hero, Leonid McGill, are back in the new New York Times best-selling mystery series that's already being hailed as a classic of contemporary noir.

Leonid McGill - the protagonist introduced in The Long Fall, the book that returned Walter Mosley to best-seller lists nationwide - is still fighting to stick to his reformed ways while the world around him pulls him in every other direction. He has split up with his girlfriend, Aura, because his new self won't let him leave his wife - but then Aura's new boyfriend starts angling to get Leonid kicked out of his prime, top-of-theA-skyscraper office space.

Meanwhile, one of his sons seems to have found true love - but the girl has a shady past that's all of sudden threatening the whole McGill family. And his other son, the charming rogue Twilliam, is doing nothing but enabling the crisis.

Most ominously of all, Alfonse Rinaldo, the mysterious power-behind- the-throne at City Hall, the fixer who seems to control every little thing that happens in New York City, has a problem that even he can't fix - and he's come to Leonid for help.

It seems a young woman has disappeared, leaving murder in her wake, and it means everything to Rinaldo to track her down. But he won't tell McGill his motives, which doesn't quite square with the new company policy - but turning down Rinaldo is almost impossible to even contemplate.

Known to Evil delivers on all the promise of the characters and story lines introduced in The Long Fall, and then some. It careens fast and deep into gritty, glittery contemporary Manhattan, making the city pulse in a whole new way, and it firmly establishes Leonid McGill as one of the mystery world's most iconic, charismatic leading men.