Kevin Gallagher: My guest on this segment is one of my favorite authors Walter Mosley creator of the Easy Rawlins Detective series. Some of you may only know of his work through the movie Devil with the Blue Dress, with Denzel Washington, but he is much more than that. Walter Mosley is here on the occasion of the publishing of his latest novel “Down the River Unto the Sea” which features yet another new memorable fictional Detective “Joe King Oliver”.
Interview on SoundCloud
Introducing King Oliver
AmazonB&NYour local bookstore Available: February 20, 2018
On February 20th, Mulholland Books will publish a new novel from Walter Mosley titled Down the River Unto the Sea. In this book a former NYPD cop once imprisoned for a crime he did not commit must solve two cases: that of a man wrongly condemned to die, and his own.
Joe King Oliver was one of the NYPD’s finest investigators, until, dispatched to arrest a well-heeled car thief, he is framed for assault by his enemies within the NYPD, a charge which lands him in solitary at Rikers Island.
A decade later, King is a private detective, running his agency with the help of his teenage daughter, Aja-Denise. Broken by the brutality he suffered and committed in equal measure while behind bars, his work and his daughter are the only light in his solitary life. When he receives a card in the mail from the woman who admits she was paid to frame him those years ago, King realizes that he has no choice but to take his own case: figuring out who on the force wanted him disposed of—and why.
Running in parallel with King’s own quest for justice is the case of a Black radical journalist accused of killing two on-duty police officers who had been abusing their badges to traffic in drugs and women within the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Joined by Melquarth Frost, a brilliant sociopath, our hero must beat dirty cops and dirtier bankers, craven lawyers, and above all keep his daughter far from the underworld in which he works. All the while, two lives hang in the balance: King’s client’s, and King’s own.
