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Blonde Faith ? Audiobook
An Easy Rawlins mystery
Walter Mosley
Read by Michael Boatman
Unabridged 6 CDs 7 Hours
Hachette Audio 2007
I was not impressed with the tenth Easy Rawlins mystery Blonde Faith. Then again, I am not a Walter Mosley fan. I find it fascinating though that when this whodunit was read to me by Michael Boatman (Spin City) many of the things I dislike about Mosley disappeared and I rather enjoyed it.
Boatman does a great job reading Blonde Faith and performing the many characters. This is even truer considering this mystery has a hell of a lot of characters in it. What really helped me enjoy this audio book though was his interpretation of Easy Rawlins. I had read this novel and could not but hear the main character as a rather whiny po' little ol' me kind of guy and this really did not help my enjoying the book. Boatman makes Rawlins sound much more like the hard boiled private eye he is supposed to be.
Blonde Faith is, plot wise, a pretty good mystery. Rawlins sets out to find two of his friends: Christmas Black and a guy called Mouse. He gets involved in a drug trafficking operation run by some dirty American soldiers in the process, meets a beautiful babe or three, as a one night stand or two, and pines for his lost love -and this, even Boatman could not make enjoyable.
Stand-up comic Chris Rock has one of the best routines on the names some Black Americans give their children. I would love to hear his take on the names Mosley gives many of his characters: Feather, Easter Dawn, Jesus, Tourmaline, and so on. Personally, I cannot get over this and this is another thing that gets in my way of enjoying an Easy Rawlins story.
Blonde Faith as read by Michael Boatman is one of the better audio book mysteries I have heard. It does have the usual flaw of the musical bridge between some chapters that drowns out the reader's voice at the end and the beginning. Having one reader perform half a different roles, male and female, is also a bit much sometimes.