Easy Rawlins Black Betty

Starred review from May 30, 1994
It ain't easy being Easy. Especially not now, as Mosley ( White Butterfly ) brings his much-admired, reluctant L.A. sleuth, Easy Rawlins, to the cusp of the 1960s without his wife and daughter, his real estate riches or the hopes and ambitions that fueled his earlier years. Easy must grab at the $400 he's offered to locate Elizabeth Eady, a missing housekeeper who several years and a few lifetimes away was ``Black Betty,'' a sensual presence on the Houston streets where he grew up. Easy understands that Betty (``. . . a great shark of a woman. Men died in her wake'') has a mythical importance to him, but he doesn't know why the rich and dysfunctional California family she recently worked for is offering so much money to find her, or why her brother Marlon is also missing--and likely dead, given the spilled blood found in his place. Easy isn't always able to concentrate on the case. His pal Mouse, just out of the slammer, wants help finding the guy who sold him out to the cops; all the rage Mouse acts unthinkingly on, Easy feels too and struggles to contain. In measured, quietly emotive prose, Mosley moves his work away from conventional genre fiction, tinkering, abandoning and later returning to the mystery element. Nevertheless, the solution fully satisfies as Easy opts for smaller victories--not the white man's riches, but maybe a few bucks in his pocket and some time with the two adopted kids that now constitute his family. Author tour.

The early 1960s find sometime-detective Easy Rawlins struggling to make a life for himself and his adopted children. When he's offered two hundred dollars to find "Black Betty," a missing housekeeper who enthralled him years earlier, he reluctantly agrees. The seemingly simple case sends Easy to jail and brings him perilously close to death. Narrator Stanley Bennett Clay is masterful in vocalizing a challenging cast of characters, ranging from prostitutes to millionaires, lawyers, and street people of every description. His depiction of the murderer who adds to Easy's troubles is both amusing and appropriate. J.J.B. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine