Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Walter Mosley at his best, 14 Oct 2002
By A Customer
Once again Walter Mosley recounts the tales of Easy Rawlins. From 'Devil in a Blue Dress' to 'Bad Boy Brawley Brown', Rawlins adventures have always been unmissable. In this book, Easy comes out of semi-retirement to help a friend. Missing the force of his recently deceased partner Mouse, Easy fights against revolutionaries, police and just about anyone who gets in his way. Read the book, and see why Mosley is the master of the genre.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Easy Rawlin's Odyssey Through Post-War L.A. Continues!, 21 Jul 2002
Walter Mosley continues his odyssey through the post-war world of Southern California, as seen through the eyes of Afro-American protagonist Easy Rawlins. Rawlins is a great modern fictional character, and he comes alive on every page, as he has done since the very first novel in the series.
Life is still hard in 1960s America, and the subtle racial and social commentary that characterized the other Easy Rawlins novels continues here.
The writing, as always, has a nice flow and the dialogue is believable and often very humorous.
I have only two minor complaints: First, the character of Easy Rawlins is so fleshed out that there is sometimes not enough room for the development and characterization of other characters. Easy's girlfriend, for example, never truly comes alive. On the other hand, Rawlins' relationship with his adopted children is still very believable and shows the emotional side of the character.
Second, Easy Rawlins is running the risk of becoming too puritanical (or politically correct). He has his inner demons, yes, but he has already given up the occasional drink and this time around he even wants to give up the Chesterfields. Maybe he will become a vegetarian in the next novel?Still, if you have read and enjoyed the other novels in the series you are sure to like this one. And if you are new to the world of Easy Rawlins, the novel is very accessible to new readers - recapturing in an unobtrusive way what has gone before.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Taste of '60s Los Angeles, 14 Nov 2004
The sixth installment of Mosley's LA-set series opens a few months after the traumatic events of Little Yellow Dog (including the apparent death of his best friend, Mouse). Easy Rawlins is trying to get his life back on track as the woman he met in that last adventure, Bonnie, has moved in with him and his children, Feather and Jesus. However, his old friend John, who did him a few favors in that last book, calls upon Easy for help. John's stepson Brawly seems to have fallen in with a bad crowd of black revolutionaries and John wants Easy to extricate him before anything bad happens. There's a nice subplot about Jesus wanting to drop out of high school, and how Easy deals with that, which ties into the father/son theme that runs strongly throughout the entire series.But this relatively simple favor gets quickly complicated as Brawly proves hard to find and Easy stumbles across yet another dead body (it would be interesting to go through the series and tally up how many times Easy has come across a corpse). Soon he is digging into Brawly's family history, as well as attempting to meet members of the Urban Revolutionary Party. This allows Mosley to show the state of the civil rights movement, which is shown in all shades of gray--from militant, to earnest, to misguided, to naive, to indifferent, and everything in between. It also allows him to highlight the dirty tricks of the FBI and police, who had special clandestine units set up to monitor and sabotage groups like the fictional Urban Revolutionary Party. One minor flaw in the book is the generic feel of this group, they come across as a small collection of earnest, but vaguely naive and misguided people. As usual in the Easy Rawlins series, as he drives around town poking around, lots of characters are introduced--many of which are more interesting than the main characters. Also as usual, what should be relatively straightforward is awfully complicated, and of course the racist police are just waiting to crack some heads. Fortunately for Easy, he keeps hearing the dead Mouse's voice in his head, dispensing advice when things get tough. This device gets pretty cheesy after a while, and one keeps waiting for Mouse to arise from the dead and walk into the story at a crucial point. Another minor flaw with the book is that almost the entire book passes with little information about Brawly, there's little reason for the reader to care about whether Easy rescues him or not. Even Easy starts questioning just how deep he's going to get into the matter, and whether Brawly is worth it. The ultimate solution at the end is rather a neat one, and on the whole, the book is one of the stronger in the series. Note: At one point in the book, Easy makes the angry point that there are no black Ambassadors representing his country. While is is certainly true that America's diplomatic corps has been largely white until the 1970s, in point of fact, the first black Ambassador was appointed in 1948 as envoy to Liberia. His name was Edward Dudley, and his story and that of other early black diplomats is detailed in the book Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945-1969.
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by Walter Mosley
by Walter Mosley
by Walter Mosley
by Walter Mosley
by Walter Mosley
