by Walter Mosley
Easy Rawlins, world-weary Black private eye in late 1960s Los Angeles, need to find out whether a young white Vietnam veteran has killed a man. Did he really stab someone in defense of a mysterious young woman? Or was it a dream brought on by his PTSD? Rawlins takes a dive into L.A.’s underworld to find out in the 15th book in Mosley’s series.
Overall: Updates classic noir (think Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler) with a Black private investigator. Easy Rawlins, the narrator, has starred in 15 books by Walter Mosley. I hadn’t read any of them, but this book still felt accessible. I’m sure I would have gotten more out of it if I had the backstory, but don’t let that stop you from giving Blood Grove a try if you like noir mysteries.
Likes: I liked the 1960s L.A. setting, Easy’s narrative voice, the deadpan asides, and the eccentric cast of male characters. I appreciated Mosely working the struggles specific to a Black man in this era into the plot – in particular, Easy being “paid” for a job with a Rolls Royce that he can’t drive without being pulled over. Police corruption and harassment is a trope of noir that Mosley adeptly uses to highlight racism, setting his book apart from (and in my opinion above) the classics of the genre.
Dislikes: This book successfully embraces many of the tropes of the noir genre, which is great, but I intensely dislike some of those tropes. The female characters are all extremely beautiful, for example, and some were pretty much interchangeable. Maneaters and femme fatales abound; sympathetic women with complicated emotions, not so much. I like double crosses and twisty plots, but there were so many in this book I had trouble following along at times.
“It’s a bad sign when you start discussing murder as if it were a chore done out of sequence.”
“His idea of an investigation had more to do with conquest than it did with intelligence.”
Liz Helfrich 