In this thrilling mystery from “master of craft and narrative” Walter Mosley (National Book Foundation), Detective Easy Rawlins has settled into the happy rhythm of his new life when a dark siren from his past returns and threatens to destroy the peace he’s fought for.
The name Easy Rawlins stirs excitement in the hearts of readers and fear in the hearts of his foes. His success has bought him a thriving detective agency, with its first female detective; a remote home, shared with children and pets and lovers, high atop the hills overlooking gritty Los Angeles; and more trouble, more problems, and more threat to those whom he loves. In other words, he’s still beset on all sides.
A number of below-the-law powerbrokers plead with Easy to locate a mysterious, dangerous woman—Lutisha James, though she’s gone by another name that Easy will immediately recognize. 1970s Los Angeles is a transient city of delicate, violent balances, and Lutisha has disturbed that. She also has a secret that will upend Easy’s own life, painfully closer to home.
In Mosley’s new Easy Rawlins novel, “Farewell, Amethystine,” his hero is pulled into a missing-persons case that turns into much more.
Review by E.A. Aymar, The Washington Post May 25, 2024
A crop of new, talented crime-fiction writers has begun to make its mark — appearing on bestseller lists, earning award nominations and filling spots at respected book festivals. This is encouraging, even as the genre’s lodestars remain. Smoothly gliding through this chorus of hungry voices is Walter Mosley. His latest Easy Rawlins mystery, “Farewell, Amethystine,” shows that he is still at the top of a genre he helped to pioneer.
Easy Rawlins’ latest client sends him down a warren of memory and nostalgia, blinding him to reason and risk, from “master of the genre,” (Washington Post) Walter Mosley.
January 1970 finds Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, LA’s premier Black detective, at 50 years of age despite all expectations. He has a loving family, a beautiful home, and a thriving investigation agency. All is right with the world… and then Amethystine Stoller, his own personal Helen of Troy, arrives. Her ex-husband is missing. A simple enough case. But even as Easy takes his first step in the investigation he trips. He falls into the memory of things past. Little things, like loss, love, a world war, and a hunger that has eaten at him since he was a Black boy on his own on the streets of Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas.
The missing ex, a young white man named Curt Fields, is found dead. Easy’s only real friend in the LAPD, Melvin Suggs, has gone into hiding rather than allow his femme fatale wife to go to the gas chamber. And that’s only the beginning.
Easy finds himself pressed into a reckoning. All of his success cannot succor his heart. The 1970’s have ushered in new expectations of men and women, Black and White, and Easy has to make a choice that will almost certainly hasten a permanent descent, one that might sunder his soul.
Walter Mosley’s infamous detective Easy Rawlins is back, with a new mystery to solve on the sun-soaked streets of Southern California.
Ezekiel “Easy” Porterhouse Rawlins is an unlicensed private investigator turned hard-boiled detective always willing to do what it takes to get things done in the racially charged, dark underbelly of Los Angeles.
But when Easy is approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran—a young white man who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a white woman from a black man—he knows he shouldn’t take the case.
Though he sees nothing but trouble in the brooding ex-soldier’s eyes, Easy, a vet himself, feels a kinship form between them. Easy embarks on an investigation that takes him from mountaintops to the desert, through South Central and into sex clubs and the homes of the fabulously wealthy, facing hippies, the mob, and old friends perhaps more dangerous than anyone else.
Set against the social and political upheaval of the late 1960s, Blood Grove is ultimately a story about survival, not only of the body but also the soul.
Widely hailed as “incomparable” (Chicago Tribune) and “dazzling” (Tampa Bay Times), Walter Mosley proves that he’s at the top of his game in this bold return to the endlessly entertaining series that has kept fans on their toes for years.
Ezekiel “Easy” Porterhouse Rawlins is an African American World War II veteran turned private detective living in Los Angeles. Starting with author Walter Mosley’s first novel about the detective, Devil in a Blue Dress, the series follows Rawlins as he investigates crimes and navigates the social injustices and race politics of America in the 1940s–’60s. Easy falls into unlicensed private detective work after losing his job at a defense plant. And unlike some other detectives on this list, as an amateur African American private detective, Rawlins is keen to avoid intervention of the police at all costs. In total, Mosley has written 14 novels about the detective, the most recent one being Charcoal Joe in 2016.
For more than 15 years I’ve been working on a novel called John Woman. You might say that I’ve been pondering this idea my entire adult life, ever since I enrolled at the radical arts institution, Goddard College, up in Vermont.
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”.
We hosted an interview from last fall with Walter Mosley about his newly published book, Folding the Red Into the Black: Developing a Viable UNtopia for Human Survival in the 21st Century.
Mosley is the author of more than 43 critically acclaimed books, including the major bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
SOUTH BEND — At the end of the novel “Blonde Faith,” Walter Mosley decided that Easy Rawlins, his most famous character, had to die.
So after 11 Easy Rawlins novels since “Devil in a Blue Dress” debuted in 1990, Mosley decided to allow Rawlins to have a fatal accident at the end of “Blonde Faith” in 2007.
Mosley told an audience at the St. Joseph County Public Library that he didn’t know where to take Rawlins, the black World War II veteran private eye whom the world first met in “Devil in a Blue Dress.”
“‘Blonde Faith’ was a very romantic novel in a way and I really liked that,” he said. “I enjoyed it, but I felt that I was repeating myself.” Read the rest of this entry »
SOUTH BEND — “Devil in a Blue Dress,” a 1990 mystery novel by Walter Mosley, will be the “One Book, One Michiana” selection for 2017.
The title was announced Monday by the St. Joseph County Public Library.
Community residents will be encouraged to read the book, and participate in a series of related discussions, lectures, film screenings and other events this spring.
“Devil in a Blue Dress” was Mosley’s first published book. The plot focuses on black war veteran Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins and his transformation from a day laborer into a detective. The story is set in 1948 in the Watts area of Los Angeles.
The novel won a 1991 Shamus Award in the category “Best First P. I. Novel.”
The book was made into a 1995 film of the same name, starring Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins, and also featured Jennifer Beals, Tom Sizemore, Maury Chaykin and Don Cheadle.”
We hosted an interview from last fall with Walter Mosley about his newly published book, Folding the Red Into the Black: Developing a Viable UNtopia for Human Survival in the 21st Century.
SOUTH BEND — At the end of the novel “
SOUTH BEND — “
