ROSE GOLD by Walter Mosley

GRADE: C+

 *Book 13 of the Easy Rawlins Series*

 

Easy Rawlins needs money. Again. This guy can't get a break. Sometimes I wish that this series would just end where Easy acquires a bunch of money, sends Feather off to a good school overseas, retires from running the streets, settles down on farmland out in Ventura somewhere with Bonnie and tend crops on his farm all day. He definitely deserves it. But nope, them's the breaks. Easy seems destined to roam the streets of Los Angeles as a private dick. Money trouble always seems to creep up on him. This time his rental properties need city-required repairs and his adopted daughter Feather has been invited to go to an expensive Ivy prep school. The LAPD stop by his new house just in time to offer him a heap of money to help locate a kidnapped UC Santa Barbara coed that might just turn out to be a Patty Hearst situation.

I'm starting to feel more and more now that Mosley should end this series soon. No, not really, I'd miss Easy too much! But it at least needs an overhaul. It's suffering from what befalls so many other detective series: stale plots. The plots are starting to get repetitive. The last book, Little Green, was also pretty forgettable for this same reason. This book lost any tension it might've had pretty early on, after you discover that there's not much danger. It's disappointing because I think that a Patty Hearst-style kidnapping would be ripe for an engaging story. The series needs to be shaken and spiced up a little bit, the way Mosley did in the great installment Cinnamon Kiss, where Easy had something to really fight for. But, Mosley's great writing, the highly-readable main character, and his motley cast of friends and colleagues introduced in previous novels, are enough to keep me going, despite the yawn-inducing plot.

LITTLE SCARLET by Walter Mosley

* Book 9 of the Easy Rawlins series *
 
This was the first Easy Rawlins novel to come close to being as good as the first, Devil In A Blue Dress. The books in between have all been decent, but until now, none have been able to match the urgency and freshness of the first novel. In Little Scarlet, Easy is a changed man after witnessing the violence and destruction during the 1965 race riots in Watts, and he searches for the murderer of a black woman in the riot's aftermath. Using the riots as a setting really upped the ante from the previous novels, giving all of the usual detective stuff way more weight. The city has changed and everytime Easy steps outside you can feel that change and the danger. The series has always also been a look at race relations in the 40's-60's and that theme is made that much more potent in this book. And although the series isn't always stellar, this one really set the standard for higher stakes in the next two really good Easy novels, Cinnamon Kiss and Blonde Faith.

GRADE: B+

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS by Walter Mosley

GRADE: A

*Book 1 of the Easy Rawlins Series*

This book is firmly on my list of favorite novels, and the beginning to what I believe to be an essential detective series. Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins is a young black WWII veteran who has lost his job and is eager to jump at an opportunity when a shady white businessman hires him to locate a pretty white woman named Daphne Monet, who is known for gettin' her party on at black nightclubs.

This is not only one of the best debut crime novels, but also features what I think is one of the best series characters, especially in the detective genre. I think that Easy is a wonderful character and dissimilar to other film noir detectives in a number of ways. He is a totally reluctant investigator. He doesn't have an office or a secretary, and proves to be great at the job because of his wits, his relationships, his awareness of race, and being in touch with his community. And you can actually believe why women are attracted to him. It's great witnessing the change in him as he uncovers secrets that he is unprepared for. I love how evocative the book is of 1940's inner city Los-Angeles, especially in the South Central area. It has a complicated and intriguing plot, and because of Walter Mosley's soulful and effortless prose, this detective story never gets boring.

An awesome running start to a wonderful series that evolves in great ways. The series should definitely be read in order but other standout novels in the series include A Little Yellow Dog, as well as the later novels like Little Scarlet, Cinnamon Kiss, and Blonde Faith.