South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
It’s 1969, and Easy Rawlins is back in Mosley’s ‘Blood Grove’
Walter Mosley easily glides back to his Easy Rawlins series in this strong 15th outing, “Blood Grove.” It has been five years since the private detective was last seen in “Charcoal Joe” (2016) — Mosley has been busy with other projects, including working on the FX TV series “Snowfall.” The Easy novels launched Mosley’s writing career and, beginning with “Devil in a Blue Dress”
(1990), have chronicled the life of a Black man post World War II. Mosley effortlessly moves the series to 1969 in “Blood Grove,” showing just how far Easy has come.
Easy is now at a different point in his life — he owns a private detective agency, lives in a gorgeous house and has a wonderful relationship with his 13-yearold daughter Feather and his grown son, Jesus, who’s married with his own family.
What hasn’t changed is the racism that Easy deals with just about every day. A running situation in “Blood Grove” is that Easy has been given a Rolls Royce as payment for solving a case, yet every time he drives it — without a white person in the back seat for whom he may be the chauffeur — he is stopped by the cops.
Alone in his L.A. office, Easy is visited by a new client — a standard setup in the traditional p.i. novel. Craig Kilian is a young, white Vietnam vet traumatized by battle fatigue. Craig believes he killed a Black man who was attacking a woman in a blood-orange grove in the Los Angeles countryside. Despite the differences in age and race, Easy connects Craig’s combat experiences with his own during WWII, especially when Craig has an episode as a plane flies over hitting the sonic boom.
The case takes Easy through myriad strata of L.A. society, allowing him to draw from his own extended community. Naturally, Easy’s violent friend, Mouse, makes an appearance, also showing a different side. Easy worries that his adoptive daughter Feather’s biological uncle — gasp, a hippie! — may want her to leave Easy.
Mosley makes 1969 a character itself, showing how the times definitely were a-changing during that volatile year. Matters of race influence the plot of “Blood Grove.” “In America, everything is about either race or money or some combination of the two,” Easy muses.
Mosley was recently awarded the National Book Foundation’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, being the first Black man to be so honored in its 32-year history. A solid mystery, “Blood Grove” will show long-time readers just how much they have missed Easy.