Frost to deal with EU
LONDON: Britain’s former Brexit negotiator David Frost will continue to negotiate with the EU on future relations, after he was officially appointed to the British government Cabinet.
Frost is to become minister of state in the Cabinet Office to deal with Britain’s future relationship with the EU from March. The 55-year-old will head the joint committee with the EU.
Frost is taking over from Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove, who had previously worked on the concrete implementation of the Brexit agreement.
THERE comes a moment in every Easy Rawlins mystery where you have no idea what’s going on.
The plot picks up speed, becoming hectic when dead bodies, cold-stone killers, femmes fatales, crooked cops and lost spaces pile up at top velocity. It’s at this moment when readers are most exasperated with Walter Mosley as a writer. Mosley wants readers to be immersed in the chaos of evil.
Since its debut in 1990, the Easy Rawlins series has charted a social history of Los Angeles, particularly focusing on shifting (or not) racial attitudes. Devil in a Blue Dress opened in a post-World War II Los Angeles when fate pushes Easy, an out-of-work black army vet, into his profession as a private investigator. The series has been advancing sporadically ever since.
Blood Grove, the 15th Easy Rawlins novel, takes place in the much mythologised summer of 1969. In the opening scene, Easy, who now owns his own detective agency, looks out his office window and watches the “long-haired hippies” next door as they tend to whatever illegal substances they’re growing in their backyard nursery.
In traditional hard-boiled fashion, the novel finds Easy alone in his office when trouble walks in. The prospective client is a young white man, a traumatised Vietnam vet named Craig Kilian, with a strange story to tell.
A few nights earlier, Craig was camping in a grove of blood oranges in the San Fernando Valley, a place he retreats to when his nerves and nightmares get too bad. In the middle of the night, Craig heard a woman screaming and he ran to a dilapidated cabin nearby where he found a black man wielding a knife at a white woman who was tied to a tree.
Craig says he wrested the knife away and, by accident, stabbed the black man. Then, someone came from behind and knocked Craig out cold. When Craig awoke, he was alone. He needs to know if he killed the man and if the woman is okay.
There are plenty of reasons Easy should turn down this case. Craig’s memory is clearly unreliable and the racial identities of those involved are a potentially dangerously complicating factor. Nevertheless, Easy agrees to investigate for one overriding reason: he and Craig are both combat veterans.
What ensues is the Tilt-a-Whirl of a careening plot, but throughout
Blood Grove Mosley also summons up images of places that linger.
The central mystery in Blood Grove – as in all the Easy Rawlins books – is as much about the brazen contradictions of American society as it is about what happened in that orange grove one night. But that mystery turns out to be pretty gripping, too.