Little Green: Easy Rawlins 12

At his best, a piece of furniture is not simply something occupying space, but a bolt of fabric weaved into a rich and complex history lesson:. I wondered about that table. Maybe it had been constructed in some ancient Spanish canton in the twelfth or thirteenth century, moved from place to place until it found its way aboard a galleon bound for the New World. Now that same table, so well built that it had outlasted its own history, was in a California home that conformed to its forgotten origins. The problem with Little Green is that these moments of brilliance stand in stark contrast to almost everything else.

Or how about this one: This is Easy describing a black man who sits with his hands cuffed behind his back in a police station booking area:.

Easy Rawlins Is Alive, Or Is He?

Nothing holds the attention of either for long. And poor Easy ends up looking clueless as a result. Which may have been fine when he was supposed to be somewhat clueless — back in his early Devil in a Blue Dress days when he was only a detective in spirit. And yet none of this questionable judgment can alter the fact that Easy is a special and incredible man. Bigoted patrolmen seem to hassle him without cause at every turn, and no Caucasian behind a service counter ever treats him with anything but suspicion and disrespect.

These incidents are clearly meant to remind us that four years before the Ford Pinto mentioned early on in the book came into being, by the way was still a tough time to be a black man in America.

More books by Walter Mosley

Which is true enough. But having Easy abused in this manner over and over again evokes a time and place more befitting Biloxi, Mississippi, circa Jackson Blue, Christmas Black, etc. But the names that really jar, yanking one out of the book every time they appear, have nothing to do with color: By submitting this form, you are granting: After he is found dying and nursed back to health by his best friend, the cold-blooded killer Mouse, Easy Rawlins is off on another adventurous case that immediately reminds us just how much we missed him. The new character has appeared in four books to be exact.

And boy did we miss our favorite 60s-era black private eye.

• Little Green.
• Little Green (Easy Rawlins, book 12) by Walter Mosley.
• Little Green: Easy Rawlins 12 by Walter Mosley - Books - Hachette Australia.

We see quickly why we missed Easy so much. Still, not quite recovered, physically or mentally from the tragic accident, Rawlins embarks on a search for a teenager known as Little Green. And he takes on this assignment as a personal favor to Mouse. It is a world of free love, psychedelic drugs and for the first time since his days as a soldier in World War II France, Rawlins sees a truly color-blind world.

Little Green (Easy Rawlins, #12) by Walter Mosley

But once he steps back outside that world, all the demons, evil and racism remain, stronger than ever. There are the racist cops who want to arrest and destroy him, and the racist thugs who want to kill him. And, oh, the black thugs too. All the characters we had grown to love are back.

And his genius friend Jackson Blue, who will forever fear Rawlins, but knows also that he can always turn to him for help or protection. Mosley is compared a lot to Raymond Chandler. We were introduced to Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress in We were with him as his children grow into a young man and a young lady.

We saw him get older and slower, but wiser. And we saw him fall in love only to have his heart broken. Then there are the inevitable plots and subplots, and many surprises.