Walter Mosleyโs indelibleย detective Easy Rawlins is back, with a new detective agency and a new mystery toย solve.
Picking up where his last adventures in Rose Gold left off in L.A. in the late 1960s, Ezekiel โEasyโ Rawlins finds his life in transition. Heโs readyโfinallyโto propose to his girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, and start a life together. And heโs taken the money he got from the Rose Gold case and, together with two partners, Saul Lynx and Tinsford โWhisperโ Natly, has started a new detective agency. But,ย inevitably, a case gets in the way: Easyโs friend Mouse introduces him to Rufus Tyler, a very old man everyone calls Charcoal Joe. Joeโs friendโs son, Seymour (young, bright, top of his class in physics at Stanford), has been arrested and charged with the murder of a white man from Redondo Beach. Joe tells Easy he will pay and pay well to see this young man exonerated, but seeing as how Seymour literally was found standing over the manโs dead body at his cabin home, and considering the racially charged motives seemingly behind the murder, that might prove to be a tall order.
ย ย ย Between his new company, a heart that should be broken but is not, a whole raft of new bad guys on his tail, and a bad odor that surrounds Charcoal Joe, Easy has his hands full, his horizons askew, and his life in shambles around his feet.