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.