Blue Light (1998)

Fans of the Easy Rawlins mystery series may find themselves perplexed, and more than a little bored, by the turn Walter Mosley has taken with the pseudo-sci-fi thriller Blue Light about the Blues, an underground community — in the San Francisco of the mid-'60s, no less — that has been zapped by a Poltergeist-like metaphysical force that evolves human consciousness to a dangerously heightened level. The novel's inertia is only sporadically relieved by Gray Man, a Blues foe with a penchant for carnage. Not even artful prose can rescue Mosley, who seems cowed by his own New Age-y concept. C