Review by Booklist Review
Mosley's long march through the 1960s continues as Easy Rawlins, now in his forties, finds himself thrust into multiple family crises. His daughter, Feather, has contracted a rare blood disease and is likely to die unless Easy can find a way to pay for treatment at a Swiss hospital. His lethal but loyal friend Mouse has just the ticket--an armored-car holdup--but Easy, determined to bring some stability to his life, opts instead to help a fellow sleuth track a vanished lawyer and his beautiful assistant, Cinnamon Cargill. The armored-car job might have been a wiser choice. Soon Easy has nothing but trouble: dead bodies turning up wherever he goes, a stone killer on his trail, and a potentially scandalous plot involving decades-old dealings with the Nazis. The trail takes Easy from L.A. to San Francisco and affords him his first bemused look at the burgeoning counterculture in Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury. Mosley's justly celebrated series typically juxtaposes human drama against a recognizable historical moment (last year's Little Scarlet took place during the Watts riots), revealing what history feels like from the perspective of an individual African American man. This time the historical moment is less vivid--the hippie encounters are mostly peripheral--but the human drama is more highly charged than ever. Readers accustomed to the aggressive interaction between history and character may feel less engaged this time, but the melancholic, inward-turning Easy who emerges here offers his own multidimensional rewards. Like the best crime series, the Rawlins novels continue to evolve in surprising ways. --Bill Ott Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
As shown in the superb 10th entry in Mosley's Easy Rawlins series (Devil in a Blue Dress, etc.), Easy's progress is never smooth and his achievements (responsible job, son and daughter both flowering, loving woman in his house, friends and even a grudging respect from local authorities) always fragile. Now, at the height of the Vietnam War era, it all threatens to collapse. Daughter Feather's mysterious illness is the proximate cause, and only an expensive Swiss clinic offers hope. Needing the nearly impossible sum of $35,000, Easy considers assisting his dangerous pal, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, with a robbery. But he decides instead to try his luck on a missing persons job brokered by white friend and PI Saul Lynx. Easy leaves Los Angeles for San Francisco, where his new employer puts him on the trail of a wealthy and eccentric lawyer and the lawyer's exotic lover, a girl known as Cinnamon, who have disappeared. As ever, Mosley is able to capture the era-hippies, Watts, communes-in brief strokes that provide a brilliant background to Easy's search for solutions to both a convoluted mystery and complex personal problems. Agent, Gloria Loomis. 10-city author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Easy Rawlins needs some easy money-his daughter is in for some expensive medical treatment-so he agrees to find a missing attorney who seems to be more trouble than he's worth. With a ten-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
1966. Watts has stopped burning, but it's no safer for Easy Rawlins, on the trail of some mysterious documents that leave death in their wake. A man will do things he never thought he would when his little girl is sick, and Easy's considering joining his friend Mouse Alexander for a holdup so that he can finance medical treatment for his ailing daughter Feather. Then his friend Saul Lynx offers him a job that may keep him afloat: tracking down storefront attorney Axel Bowers and his servant Philomena (Cinnamon) Cargill, together with a briefcase full of unspecified papers, for San Francisco shamus Robert E. Lee, who's acting on behalf of an anonymous client. Knowing that nobody pays a black man $10,000 without good reason, Easy expects trouble and treachery. He's not surprised when he learns that Bowers is dead and the documents he's been sent to retrieve include bearer bonds and a letter with an ugly pedigree that goes back to WWII. But he's not prepared for the stone killer who suddenly pops up behind him, or for the coolly manipulative way Cinnamon uses sex to get whatever she wants, or for the bad blood between Bobby Lee and Maya Adamant, his lieutenant. And he's certainly not prepared for the emotional storm the case will stir up in his own breast. Lacks the searing intensity of Little Scarlet (2004), but still as rich and tightly wound as you'd expect from Mosley. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
