Blood grove /

It's been four years since Mosley's last Easy Rawlins novel (Charcoal Joe), whetting appetites for another installment in this long-running and much-loved series. It's 1969 this time--after beginning in the late 1940s, the series has taken residence amid the clamor of the late-sixties cultural revolution--and Rawlins, a WWII vet, is drawn into a case by a white Vietnam vet who believes he may have killed a Black man who appeared to be assaulting a white woman. When Rawlins returns to the scene, there is no sign of a struggle, and the apparent victim has vanished. Quickly, the case becomes about much more than helping a fellow vet. "In America," Rawlins observes, "everything is about either race or money," and so it is here, with a stolen $300,000 serving as the story's MacGuffin, and the ever-present hostility Rawlins encounters as a Black investigator interacting with white people (especially cops) offering every bit as much of a threat as the mobsters after the money. As always, Easy's finely calibrated understanding of and commentary on the social and racial climate around him gives the novel its defining texture and power.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A new Easy Rawlins novel is always big news in crime-fiction circles, and this fifteenth entry in the series does not disappoint.

Early in MWA Grand Master Mosley's strong 15th Easy Rawlins mystery (after 2016's Charcoal Joe), Craig Kilian, a vet traumatized by combat experiences in Vietnam, arrives unannounced one day in 1969 at the L.A. detective agency that employs Easy. Craig, a white man, tells Easy he got into a fight with a knife-wielding Black man who was about to attack a white woman tied to a tree at a remote campsite. After fatally stabbing the Black man, Craig was hit in the head and lost consciousness. When he woke up, the body and the woman were gone. WWII vet Easy feels sympathy for Craig, and agrees to help find out what happened at the campsite. The upright detective soon becomes caught in a web of trouble involving stolen money, grisly murders, and weird sex clubs. Amid all the twists and turns and double-crosses, Easy confronts racism, an enduring feature "of the America I loved and hated." Mosley does a fine job highlighting a world of Black survivors who know how difficult their struggle remains, every day of every decade. This marvelous series is as relevant as ever. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis. (Feb.)

Mosley's Blood Grove puts popular protagonist Easy Rawlins front and center again (40,000-copy first printing).

The uneasy passage of Easy Rawlins through late-20th-century Los Angeles continues at the hinge of the 1960s and '70s in one of the knottiest cases of the Black detective's long and bloody career. It's one thing trying to solve a murder. It's still another trying to prevent a murder. But try helping somebody determine whether he murdered someone or not--and without any evidence, like, say, blood or a corpse. That's the dicey situation facing private eye Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins in the summer of 1969 when Vietnam War veteran Craig Kilian wanders into his office carrying a nasty bruise on his head and an especially volatile strain of post-traumatic stress syndrome. It takes an abrupt and violent mood swing before Craig manages to tell Easy about a moonlight encounter in an orange grove involving a half-naked White woman tied to a tree, screaming "Alonzo" as someone Craig describes as "a big black man with long straight hair" is standing next to her with a knife. Craig lunges at what he believes to be the woman's attacker, and all Craig remembers before being knocked unconscious is wrestling with the other man on the ground and feeling the knife sink into the other man's chest. When Craig comes to, there's no one around the campsite but a small black dog. "No white girl or black man. I didn't even see any blood on the ground," says Craig, who wants Easy to find out where they went and whether he killed the man. Easy's got an inventory of questions, chiefly how somebody like Craig got referred to him in the first place. Nevertheless, Easy, who served in Europe during World War II, takes the case, partly in solidarity with a fellow vet's travails. It doesn't take long for Easy to begin regretting this decision as he finds himself fitfully making his way through a minefield of thieves, crime bosses, prostitutes, goons, and, as always, racist White cops who even after a decade of civil rights laws, race riots, and cultural upheaval can't bring themselves to acknowledge that a smart, self-possessed Black man like Easy Rawlins, who at this point in the series is pushing 50, deserves to drive around LA in a yellow Rolls Royce that belongs to him. It's hard to believe Mosley once gave serious thought to killing off his first detective hero. He's still got plenty of game. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.