It’s a lot easier, I suspect, to sell a “new mystery” by Walter Mosley than “a new collection of stories about a convicted murderer’s existential search for self” or “a new coming-of-age novel set in the Louisiana Bayou.” I refer, respectively, to “Walkin’ the Dog” and “Gone Fishin’,” Mosley’s best books, and “Fearless Jones” only truly sings when Mosley discards the story and concentrates on the atmospherics of those near-masterpieces. One gets the sense from “Fearless Jones” that Mosley doesn’t care much about mystery novels anymore, but that his publishers do. As Paris says of him, “Fearless was more free in that iron cage than I was, or would ever be, on the outside.” He is smarter, kinder, and less random than Mouse, equally at home in jail or out. Fearless is a stone killer for sure, but only when provoked. But when I got out of that car, there was no cape dragging behind me, only a tail between my legs.” On the other hand, his foil, the titular character Fearless Jones, is very different from Mouse, the amoral psychotic who bailed out Easy Rawlins in book after book, decade after decade. At the end of one chapter, he says about himself, “I sat there trying to will myself up the evolutionary ladder from man to superman. The new protagonist, Paris Minton, is less heroic, less willing and less willful than Easy ever was, and he is certainly less tough. It’s as though Mosley has taken the elements of his popular Easy Rawlins mystery series, placed them in a burlap bag and shaken. They are black, and they have to watch their step. They have ecstatic sex with questionable women and decent sex with decent women. Characters eat in diners, run through alleys and get beaten insensate by steel-fisted thugs.

The setting is once again Los Angeles, the morality once again ambiguous. Walter Mosley’s “Fearless Jones” feels familiar, like a sleeveless white cotton T-shirt you wear when you’re solving a mystery you didn’t want any part of in the first place. By Walter Mosley, Little Brown and Co., $24.95, 320 pp.

Fearless Jones by Walter Mosley