Walter Mosley, Blood
Grove
Copyright © 2021 The Thing Itself, Inc.
Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Company
ISBN978-0-316-49118-1
Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins is, in 1969, a success, running his
own investigations firm (with a handful of employees), driving in a Rolls Royce
(not his but collateral for payment), and with a teenage step-daughter. As it happens, everyone else in the agency is
out of the office when Craig Killian, a veteran of the war in Viet Nam and suffering
the after-effects of his time there, comes in, to ask for Rawlins’ help. He’s afraid that he may have killed a man in
a blood orange grove and he needs to know. Rawlins, who had served in World War II, in
the ETO, and who knows what traumas can linger, takes the case.
Rawlins narrates the events, from what might be years after
the events. And it is a complicated
story. In addition to this
investigation, he’s responsible for his adopted teenage daughter Feather, and
has to cope with her (early 20s uncle Milo showing up). And that’s not the end of the complications,
which include the LAPD (which does not come off well—and, from everything I
have read about the LAPD in the 1960s and later, is deserved).
And “complicated” is perhaps an understatement. The cast of characters is large and varied,
and Mosley handles it well. The
investigation itself—which turns out to involve an armored-car heist (and, it
seems, the murder of the guards) of something around a half a million dollars
(about $4 million, these days, adjusted for inflation). His client dies, but he feels an obligation
to continue the investigation. He is
threatened by a…well, I guess psychotic mob boss is perhaps the best
description, for one thing. And even
finding a thread to begin his investigation seems all but impossible.
Maybe not a masterpiece, but a book I found hard to put
down, and people who will, for good or evil, remain in my memory. This pretty well sums things up: “Every now and then I think that the closest
I ever came to death was at the hands of that woman. She was a nearly perfect predator in a world
that scared the shit out of me.”
