Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins mystery novels are a like it or leave it kind of thing. Mosley’s narrative style for this series and Rawlins encountering more secondary characters than a thesaurus has synonyms makes a mystery like Farewell, Amethystine something a reader embarks on only if they are familiar with the author’s less leisurely paced works like the Leonid McGill or Fearless Jones series. Click for Farewell, Amesthystine at Amazon
In Farewell, Amethystine Easy Rawlins, a Black private detective in early seventies L.A., is hired by Amethystine Stoller, a friend of a friend, to find her ex-husband Curtis Fields, a forensic accountant. He is working for an illegal gambling racket to pay back her debt, a debt she would otherwise have to pay with her services.
It also happens that one of Easy’s two LAPD connections, Melvin Suggs, has fallen off the radar.
There are a few secondary plot lines in this mystery novel: There is a blue movie being used to blackmail someone, a plot inside the LAPD targeting a detective, and a couple of other things I could not quite get a handle on. There is even a quick reference to events in a previous mystery.
Farewell, Amethystine is enjoyable if you are a Walter Mosley fan and used to his style. I would not use this mystery to introduce a reader to this great writer or the Easy Rawlins series.
Farewell, Amethystine
Walter Mosley
An Easy Rawlins mystery
Mulholland Books 2024
324 pages
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