Rose Gold

Starred review from July 7, 2014
Set in L.A. during the height of the Vietnam War, Mosley’s impressive 13th Easy Rawlins mystery (after 2013’s Little Green) finds Roger Frisk, special assistant to the police chief, calling on Easy with a job. Rosemary Goldsmith, a student at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the daughter of munitions giant Foster Goldsmith, is missing, perhaps kidnapped. Frisk wants Easy to track down black boxer and political activist Robert Mantle, with whom Rosemary was recently seen in Los Angeles. Easy, “the man to go to if they want their finger on the jugular of the colored community,” accepts the carrot and stick offer only to discover that FBI agents and the State Department are also involved. Along the way, Easy’s trademark ability to trade favors has him helping disgraced cop Melvin Suggs, locating a stolen mixed-race child, and solving a marital problem for his pal Jackson Blue. Easy’s experiences and insights perfectly mirror the turbulent ’60s. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis Agency.

November 24, 2014
Set in 1967 Los Angeles, with the Vietnam War dominating the news, the latest book featuring Mosley’s beloved Easy Rawlins finds the private eye interrupted from settling in to his upscale new home by an increasing number of intriguing missing-person investigations. Chief among them is the search for a boxer-turned-political-protestor, last seen in the company of the missing and presumed-kidnapped daughter of munitions baron Foster Goldsmith. Reader Jackson’s cool, unruffled rendition matches the tone of Rawlins’s first-person narration, including the character’s cynical knowledge of the way things work in the racially divided city. For Easy’s LAPD pal Melvin Suggs, whose career has been blighted by his love for a lawbreaker, Jackson replaces the usual police truculence with a boozy haplessness. A long list of vivid characters spring from Mosley’s mind in each novel. Here it includes pugilists, a group of black militants known as Scorched Earth, and the Patty Hearst–like Rosemary Goldsmith. Jackson brings them all to life with admirable versatility. A Doubleday hardcover.

August 1, 2014
Easy Rawlins, who once spanned years between volumes, takes his third case of 1967. Or rather, his third batch of cases. What are the odds that the LAPD would not only press Easy (Little Green, 2013, etc.) to take a job, but offer to pay him for it? But that's exactly what Roger Frisk, special assistant to the chief of police, does. If Easy will look for international weapons manufacturer Foster Goldsmith's daughter, Rosemary, who's gone missing from UC Santa Barbara, Frisk will pay him $6,000, with a bonus of $2,500 if he actually finds her. Smelling a rat but agreeing to take the case, Easy soon realizes the police are much less interested in Rosemary than in retired boxer Battling Bob Mantle, the companion who may have kidnapped her. Easy is quickly up to his neck in other LAPD officers, FBI agents and State Department officials, united only in their demand that he drop the case on security grounds. In the course of his investigations, Easy incurs numerous debts that he can pay off only by working other jobs. His trusted police contact, Detective Melvin Suggs, wants Easy to find Mary Donovan, who passed counterfeit money and stole Suggs' heart. His ex-lover EttaMae Alexander's white friend Alana Altman wants Easy to find her boy Alton, who she suspects may have been kidnapped by her late husband's African-American relatives. Local crime lord Art Sugar suggests that Easy pass everything he learns about Bob Mantle on to him first. You have to feel bad for underemployed UCLA MBA Percy Bidwell, who insists that Easy introduce him to investment banker Jason Middleton but doesn't have anything to trade for the favor. Along the way to the untidy resolution, the most quotable of all contemporary detectives ("I knew I was in trouble because I was being told a fairy tale by a cop") stirs up enough trouble for scene after memorable scene. Mosley may not write great endings, but it's hard to top his middles.

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Starred review from August 1, 2014
Los Angeles private investigator Easy Rawlins' world is the African American subculture of the 1960s. Unable to rely on official channels in a society steeped in racism, Easy instead trades in an intricate currency of favors and friend-of-a-friend networking. When a representative of Chief of Police Parker makes Easy an offer he knows he can't refuse, the savvy PI also knows the hefty paycheck he'll receive won't compensate for the trouble the case will bring. Rosemary Goldsmith, the daughter of a weapons' mogul, has supposedly been kidnapped by Bob Mantle, a former boxer and leader in African American radical politics, who is suspected of three cop killings. But when Easy starts poking around, he finds that Mantle is not all he's been cracked up to be. Calling in favors from a host of series regulars, Easy hunts Mantle, hoping to find answers for a string of clients cropping up with connections to the case. This case is significant for introspective Easy, who has recently recovered from nearly fatal injuries (see Little Green, 2013) and finds signs for his life's new direction amid the hippies, twisted cops, and radical groups connecting Mantle to the heiress. Mosley has few peers when it comes to crafting sentences, and he's woven some beauties into this swift-moving yet philosophical story that does more for illustrating an iconic period than hours of documentary film could. This Easy Rawlins novel harks back to the great early days of the series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)