Cinnamon Kiss

Starred review from July 11, 2005
As shown in the superb 10th entry in Mosley's Easy Rawlins series (Devil in a Blue Dress
, etc.), Easy's progress is never smooth and his achievements (responsible job, son and daughter both flowering, loving woman in his house, friends and even a grudging respect from local authorities) always fragile. Now, at the height of the Vietnam War era, it all threatens to collapse. Daughter Feather's mysterious illness is the proximate cause, and only an expensive Swiss clinic offers hope. Needing the nearly impossible sum of $35,000, Easy considers assisting his dangerous pal, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, with a robbery. But he decides instead to try his luck on a missing persons job brokered by white friend and PI Saul Lynx. Easy leaves Los Angeles for San Francisco, where his new employer puts him on the trail of a wealthy and eccentric lawyer and the lawyer's exotic lover, a girl known as Cinnamon, who have disappeared. As ever, Mosley is able to capture the era—hippies, Watts, communes—in brief strokes that provide a brilliant background to Easy's search for solutions to both a convoluted mystery and complex personal problems. Agent, Gloria Loomis. 10-city author tour
.

August 15, 2005
This latest entry in Mosley's Easy Rawlins series offers much of what can be found in the earlier novels: a hard-boiled detective plot; Rawlins's black existentialism; an array of strange, exotic characters (namely, femme fatales all pining for Rawlins); detailed locales in South Central L.A.; equally detailed descriptions of food; and occasional commentary on the state of race relations in America. Yet because it is set in 1966, this work offers a bit more: Rawlins must now deal with evolving and more ambiguous racial attitudes. The plot is fairly straightforward; desperate to obtain money for an expensive treatment for his adopted daughter's unnamed but potentially fatal blood disease, Rawlins takes a leave from his job as head custodian at a public school and agrees to look for a missing woman -and some embarrassing documents. His search takes him first to San Francisco (where the manifestation of the Sixties counterculture are evident) and then back to L.A. Mosley has never been a great literary stylist, but he's a good writer of detective fiction, and his recurring characters continue to have appeal. Recommended for all public libraries and for academic libraries where interest warrants. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ "5/15/05.] -Roger A. Berger, Everett Community Coll., WA

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2005
Mosley's long march through the 1960s continues as Easy Rawlins, now in his forties, finds himself thrust into multiple family crises. His daughter, Feather, has contracted a rare blood disease and is likely to die unless Easy can find a way to pay for treatment at a Swiss hospital. His lethal but loyal friend Mouse has just the ticket--an armored-car holdup--but Easy, determined to bring some stability to his life, opts instead to help a fellow sleuth track a vanished lawyer and his beautiful assistant, Cinnamon Cargill. The armored-car job might have been a wiser choice. Soon Easy has nothing but trouble: dead bodies turning up wherever he goes, a stone killer on his trail, and a potentially scandalous plot involving decades-old dealings with the Nazis. The trail takes Easy from L.A. to San Francisco and affords him his first bemused look at the burgeoning counterculture in Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury. Mosley's justly celebrated series typically juxtaposes human drama against a recognizable historical moment (last year's " Little Scarlet "took place during the Watts riots), revealing what history feels like from the perspective of an individual African American man. This time the historical moment is less vivid--the hippie encounters are mostly peripheral--but the human drama is more highly charged than ever. Readers accustomed to the aggressive interaction between history and character may feel less engaged this time, but the melancholic, inward-turning Easy who emerges here offers his own multidimensional rewards. Like the best crime series, the Rawlins novels continue to evolve in surprising ways.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)