Down the River unto the Sea

September 15, 2017

In this latest from Mystery Writers Grand Master Mosley, a stand-alone and possible series launch, top NYPD investigator Joe King Oliver is framed by bad guys on the force and ends up at Rikers. Now he runs his own agency with teenage daughter Aja-Denise. When a woman confesses that she was paid to sell him down the river, he becomes his own client, determined to find out who wanted him off the force and why. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 13, 2017
Former NYPD detective Joe King Oliver, now the owner-operator of King Detective Service, investigates two cases of gross injustice in this excellent standalone from MWA Grand Master Mosley (Charcoal Joe and 13 other Easy Rawlins novels). Thirteen years earlier, Oliver was convicted on bogus assault charges, which ended his police career and his marriage. He spent nine months in jail before the charges were dropped and he was released without explanation. Oliver now learns that a crooked cop was behind the frame. Meanwhile, he is approached by Willa Portman, an intern for the lawyer representing Leonard Compton, a militant journalist who’s on death row for the murder of two policemen three years earlier. Portman says the killings were self-defense. Oliver, who faces a corrupt world with unflinching honesty and ruthlessness, enlists the aid of Melquarth Frost, a hardened career criminal, to even the odds in both cases. The novel’s dedication—to Malcolm, Medgar, and Martin—underlines the difference that one man can make in the fight for justice. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis Agency.

November 15, 2017
Mosley (Charcoal Joe, 2016, etc.) begins what looks to be a new series with a protagonist whose territory covers New York City's outer boroughs--and, yes, that means Staten Island, too.Joe King Oliver was an ace investigator with the NYPD until his roving eye helped him get framed for sexual assault. "Trouble ambushed me with my pants down and my nose open," as he explains to an acquaintance. He is kicked off the force and thrown into Riker's Island, where he faces the kind of demeaning and vicious attacks a jailed cop would expect from inmates until a stretch in solitary confinement and an abrupt release save his life. Eleven years later, King (as some of his friends call him) is making a living as a private eye based on Brooklyn's Montague Street when his mundane existence is jolted by two events: a letter from a woman admitting she was coerced into setting him up years before and a case involving a radical black activist who's been sentenced to death for killing two corrupt, abusive officers. King sees serendipity in the convergence of these two cases, believing that if he could exonerate the activist, it'd be a way of finally exorcising his rueful memories. His dual inquiries carry him from glittering Wall Street offices to seedy alleyways all over the city, and he encounters double-dealing lawyers, shady cops, drug addicts, hired killers, and prostitutes along the way. The only people King can count on are his loyal and precocious 17-year-old daughter, Aja-Denise, and an equally loyal but tightly wound career criminal named Melquarth "Mel" Frost, whose capacity for violence will remind Mosley devotees of Mouse, the homicidal thug who either helps or hinders Easy Rawlins in the author's first and best-known series. Indeed, so many aspects of this novel are reminiscent of other Mosley books that it tempts one to wonder whether he's stretching his resources a little thin. But ultimately it's Mosley's signature style--rough-hewn, rhythmic, and lyrical--that makes you ready and eager for whatever he's serving up.It's getting to be a bigger blues band on Mosley's stage, with Joe King Oliver now sitting in with Easy Rawlins and Leonid McGill. But as long as it sounds sweet and smoky, let the good times roll.

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Starred review from November 15, 2017
Since Mosley launched his Easy Rawlins series to universal acclaim with Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), he has published more than 50 books across multiple genres. Now he begins a new series, starring PI Joe King Oliver, and it rekindles some of the remarkable energy that drove the early Rawlins novels. Oliver was an NYPD detective until he was framed by parties unknown for sexual assault and wound up at Rikers, looking at serious time. His one remaining friend on the force gets Joe released and sets him up with a PI agency, where Joe has been toiling in desultory fashion for the last decade, supported at the agency by his teen daughter. Two new cases change everything. First, the woman Joe was accused of assaulting contacts him, admitting to taking part in the frame-up and prompting Joe to investigate his own case. Meanwhile, he takes on another case every bit as politically incendiary as his own: helping a radical African American journalist escape the electric chair. Mosley writes with great power here about themes that have permeated his work: institutional racism, political corruption, and the ways that both of these issues affect not only society at large but also the inner lives of individual men and women. And he has created a new hero in Joe Oliver with the depth and vulnerability to sustain what readers will hope becomes a new series. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With the Easy Rawlins series, though still strong, showing some signs of aging, it's the perfect moment for Mosley to unveil an exciting new hero and a series set in the present and confronting the issues that drive today's headlines.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)