The latest installment of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series finds business humming so well at Easy’s detective agency that he and his staff can kick back Monday mornings to chat about flu epidemics, Russian spy satellites, and UCLA’s attempt to oust Professor Angela Davis from her job. One bull session is interrupted by the entrance of a sultry young Black woman named Amethystine “Amy” Stoller. She wants Easy to find her ex-husband, a white accountant named Curt Fields, who’s dropped abruptly from sight. Rawlins is getting peculiar vibes from this case, most of them resonating from his younger days back in Houston’s Fifth Ward, where he’d fallen hard for an older woman named Anger Lee. Memories of that bitter affair stalk Easy as he sets out to find Fields—whose body he eventually discovers on an office floor on top of a sealed envelope with the name “Amethystine” scrawled in pencil. Easy looks for help from Melvin Suggs, his one true LAPD friend. Problem is, Suggs is in hiding, on the run trying to protect his wife from being implicated in a capital crime. Easy must uneasily navigate both cases as he fends off the usual obstacles of racist cops and violent thugs with help from his friend Fearless Jones.
