For two decades, Easy Rawlins has walked the streets of Los Angeles, and the city has given him everything: friends, family, two homes, three apartment buildings, a dog and any number of people willing to pay him to fix their broken lives. Yet something’s gone wrong. Two years after the riots, Watts smolders, Vietnam rages and Easy is losing it. He knows it. His friends know it. And, of course, Walter Mosley knows it.
The 10th Easy Rawlins novel is unlike any we’ve read. “I lit a Camel,” Easy tells us early in the book, “thought about the taste of sour mash . . . and climbed out of the car like Bela Lugosi from his coffin.” Gone is the man once happy to own a home with an avocado tree in his frontyard. Gone is the man content to nurse a drink and a smoke in a bar like Joppy’s. Gone is the man whose dalliances in bed were his most reliable and consistent solace. Still the tough-minded, tough-hearted private detective of earlier novels, the Easy of “Blonde Faith” is haunted and more vulnerable, trying to atone for his mistakes, find love and acceptance and make it through to the next day.
more from the LA Times here.