BLONDE FAITH

Easy Rawlins’s 10th case (Cinnamon Kiss, 2005, etc.), set in 1967, is a tale of three missing men, each with a personal connection to Watts’s definitive private eye.

There’s nothing unusual about the LAPD looking for Mouse Alexander, who went missing the day before Pericles Tarr, the inventory clerk he’s suspected of killing, also dropped off the map. Nor is there anything unprecedented about a child turning up in Easy’s home, the way Easter Dawn, the precocious Vietnamese girl ex-Marine Christmas Black adopted, does without a note or a word of explanation from her father. What’s unusual here is the way Easy’s attention, which ought to be focused by the gung-ho soldiers in pursuit of Christmas Black, keeps shifting from one disappearance to another. In truth, his mind isn’t really on any of them; he can’t stop thinking about Bonnie Shay, the flight attendant he threw out when she took up with an African prince. Certain he should have begged Bonnie to return, Easy is especially distracted after she phones to announce her upcoming marriage. But that doesn’t prevent him from pursuing a new romance with UCLA student Tourmaline Goss and responding to the embraces of troubled bank officer Faith Laneer, none of which prevent him from feeling “lost in my own home, in my own skin.”

Familiar territory for both Mosley (Killing Johnny Fry, 2007, etc.) and Easy, who sounds a lot more ancient than his 47 years.