By now, it’s tempting to take Mosley’s inimitable blend of taut lyricism and evocative landscapes for granted. Don’t.
The redoubtable, unstoppable Easy Rawlins has more on his plate than usual in the 17th novel of this epoch-spanning—and epoch-making—series of detective fiction.
The start of this latest chronicle in the volatile life of Ezekiel Rawlins finds him in a deep funk, a “June gloom,” as he describes it to his adopted daughter, Feather, who’s calling long-distance from France where she’s traveling with a high school student group. One would think Easy would find life, well, pretty easy now that he’s in a fulfilling romance with the alluring Amethystine “Amy” Stoller, his extended family is at peace, and his private detective business is thriving. Still, it’s 1970s Los Angeles and, successful or not, Easy is still a 50-something Black man navigating his way through a world that continually sees him as a threat, even when he’s just trying to do his job. One of those jobs comes from a “beast man” in grimy overalls and clodhopper boots all but demanding that Easy find his missing “auntie.” Easy takes the case with little to go on beyond a suspicion that Lutisha James may be mixing domestic work with some gambling. The more questions Easy asks about Lutisha from longtime friends like the homicidal Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, the more ominous the task becomes; a suspicion confirmed when he finds three family members tortured and killed in a house that was one of Lutisha’s last-known whereabouts. Even through the complications of this case, Easy finds time to help his secretary and fledgling detective Niska Redman with her own missing-persons case and help his adopted son, Jesus, get clear from a pair of corrupt federal agents. It’s a lot of pins to juggle at once, even for the resourceful Easy. And while he’s got plenty of help from friends to cope with cops and other irritants, he can’t outrun the vestiges of his East Texas past, as a jolting surprise awaits him at the other end of his search for Lutisha.
By now, it’s tempting to take Mosley’s inimitable blend of taut lyricism and evocative landscapes for granted. Don’t.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316573238
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.
Pynchon returns, this time with a wacky whodunit that spans two continents.
What’s a sub without cheese? That’s not to be taken literally, like so much of Pynchon. The sub in question is a German one plying, in an unlikely scenario, the depths of Lake Michigan. There, in Milwaukee, we find Hicks McTaggart, gumshoe, who “has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake”—the Chicago mob, in other words, drawn to Milwaukee in the void created by the absence of one Bruno Airmont, “the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile,” having legged it with a trunkload of cash some years earlier. Where could Bruno be? And why are those Germans, in those prewar days of Depression and protonationalism, skulking about under the waves? McTaggart will soon find out, sort of, having already been exposed to plenty of chatter—for, “this being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American politics has only kept growing into a game more and more complicated.” Complicated it is. Trying to keep tabs on the twists and turns of Pynchon’s plot is a fool’s errand, but suffice it to say that it involves bowling, Les Paul, organized crime, Count Basie, a Russian bike gang, Nazis, and, yes, cheese, as well as some lovely psychedelic moments, including one where “fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down.” Pynchon did the private dick thing to better effect in Inherent Vice (2009), a superior yarn in nearly every respect, so this one earns only an average grade—but then, middling Pynchon is better than a whole lot of writers’ best.
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781594206108
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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