Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley

Charcoal Joe: An Easy Rawlins Mystery by Walter Mosley --- 305 pages

In this latest Easy Rawlins mystery, Charcoal Joe, Easy is in a good place for a change: with money from his last case, he's gone into business with two partners in his own detective agency; he's about to propose to his girl friend Bonnie Shay; even his kids seem to be thriving.

But of course, all that good luck is just an illusion.

Easy's boyhood friend Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, comes asking a favor. Mouse wants Easy to clear the name of a young black man who's been arrested by the L.A. police for murders he didn't commit.

The accused, Seymour Brathwaite, is a brilliant graduate student at Stanford University, with no prior record. He says he stumbled on the murder scene by accident. The  two dead men have ties to the Los Angeles underworld and a lot of missing diamonds. The man who wants Easy Rawlins to exonerate Seymour is a legendary black mobster called Charcoal Joe, who is an old friend of Seymour's foster mother.

Easy can't turn down Mouse, even though he's not happy about getting mixed up with a man as ruthless and violent as Charcoal Joe. And Seymour, totally lacking in street smarts, is his own worst enemy, and a real liability to the investigation.  Easy has to enlist the help of another well-established Mosley character, Fearless Jones, to keep Seymour out of trouble once Easy manages to spring him from jail. But Easy still has to find out what really happened in order to prove Seymour's innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. This is 1968, and Easy has to walk a fine line with law enforcement and a legal system that is overwhelmingly white and racist. A black man is always presumed guilty.

As always, Mosley uses fiction to portray the history and experience of Southern blacks who migrated to southern California during the war years.  The racial barriers that began to break down during the 1960s created opportunities but also real risk for anyone like Easy who pushed for change.

An award-winning author of over fifty books, including fourteen Easy Rawlins mysteries, Walter Mosley was named the 2016 Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

Click HERE to watch an interview with the author discussing his new book, Charcoal Joe.

Click HERE to watch a podcast of Mosley being interviewed by Tavis Smiley on PBS.

Click HERE to read a review from the Washington Post.

Click HERE to read a review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read a review from Publishers Weekly.

Rose Gold by Walter Mosley

Rose Gold: An Easy Rawlins Mystery by Walter Mosley --- 308 pages

In his thirteenth Easy Rawlins novel, Mosley continues what some critics consider his social history of race relations in Los Angeles in the years after World War II.  Rose Gold, set during the 1967 "Summer of Love" is Mosley's riff on the Patty Hearst/Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapping that captured America's horrified fascination in that time and place.

Rose Gold --- Rosemary Goldsmith --- is the disaffected daughter of a munitions manufacturer making a fortune out of the Vietnam War, supposedly kidnapped by a black nationalist calling himself Uhuru Nolice, the leader of revolutionary group calling itself Scorched Earth. The LAPD wants Easy Rawlins to rescue Rosemary and find Uhuru Nolice (a young black ex-boxer, Robert Mantle, with a chameleon personality).

Rawlins holds his nose and takes the job because he needs the money to pay his bills and to fund his adopted daughter's education at an elite private school. But the more he finds out about the ex-boxer, Robert Mantle, and about Rosemary Goldsmith's penchant for radical causes, the more he smells the deadly stink of police corruption emanating from the case. Is Rose Gold a victim or a willing accomplice in a plot to extort money from her father to fund further mayhem?  Is Bob Mantle a radical instigator or is he being set up with a "shoot on sight" order by bent cops in the highest echelons of the LAPD?

Mosley's latest meditation on the Black American experience is fortuitously timed to remind us that our current troubles have deep roots. As Ivy Pochada observes in her review of Rose Gold for the Los Angeles Times, "Mosley didn't write "Rose Gold" as a parable of recent events in Ferguson, Mo., and beyond. He wrote it as an evocative tale of race relations in the late 1960s. If we recognize it as entirely too familiar, I do not think Easy Rawlins would be suprised."

Click HERE to read Pochada/s full review.

Click HERE to read a review from ABC News.

Click HERE to read a review on the Read Me Deadly Blog.

Little Green by Walter Mosley

Little Green: An Easy Rawlins Mystery by Walter Mosley --- 291 pages

The twelfth volume in Mosley's acclaimed crime noir series featuring his iconic P.I. Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins and set in Los Angeles in the fifties and sixties.

Readers last saw Easy in Blonde Faith (2007), comatose after his car plunges over a cliff into the sea.  In this new story, the indomitable World War II veteran and streetwise investigator has regained consciousness and is back on the street searching for a young man gone missing in the drug-fueled free love counterculture of the Sunset Strip, where peace and love can turn on the spin of a dime into murder and mayhem. A trip back in time to the mean streets of 1967 L.A. during a time of social upheaval, Little Green powerfully explores Mosley's signature themes of good and evil, guilt and redemption.