Farewell, Amethystine
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
From “master of the genre” (Washington Post) Walter Mosley, Detective Easy Rawlins’ latest client sends him down a warren of memory and nostalgia—blinding him to reason and risk.
January 1970 finds Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, LA’s premier Black detective, at 50 years of age despite all expectations. He has a loving family, a beautiful home, and a thriving investigation agency. All is right with the world… and then Amethystine Stoller, his own personal Helen of Troy, arrives. Her ex-husband is missing. A simple enough case. But even as Easy takes his first step in the investigation he trips. He falls into the memory of things past. Little things, like loss, love, a world war, and a hunger that has eaten at him since he was a Black boy on his own on the streets of Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas.
The missing ex, a young white man named Curt Fields, is found dead. Easy’s only real friend in the LAPD, Melvin Suggs, has gone into hiding rather than allow his femme fatale wife to go to the gas chamber. And that’s only the beginning.
Easy finds himself pressed into a reckoning. All of his success cannot succor his heart. The 1970’s have ushered in new expectations of men and women, Black and White, and Easy has to make a choice that will almost certainly hasten a permanent descent, one that might sunder his soul.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins tackles a multilayered missing persons case in the wistful 16th installment of Mosley's bestselling series (after Blood Grove). When Amethystine Stoller walks into Easy's L.A. office looking for her ex-husband, Curt—a forensic accountant who got mixed up with mobsters running a crooked casino—Easy agrees to help track him down. The case unsettles the PI, stirring up feelings he initially dismisses as a powerful desire for Amethystine. Before long, however, he's plunged into a labyrinth of memories about lost loves and his rough Houston childhood. Eventually, Curt turns up dead, and Easy reaches out to his only ally on the LAPD, Melvin Suggs, for help. Melvin is on the run from corrupt senior officers on the force, and the more Easy hears about his friend's plight, the more he wonders if it's connected to the same mob operations that got Curt killed. As in previous entries, the twists and turns of the investigation take a back seat to Easy's emotional journey, and Mosley sheds keen light on the difficulties of navigating life in America as a Black man. This far into the series, though, Easy's all-but-guaranteed investigative success drains the narrative of some of its dramatic tension. Still, Mosley's fans will enjoy themselves.
