Blood Grove (Easy Rawlins Book 15)

by Walter Mosley

Paperback, 2021

Call number

MYST MOS

Collection

Genres

Publication

Mulholland Books (2021), 321 pages

Description

After being approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a white woman from a black man, Easy embarks on an investigation that takes him from mountaintops to the desert, through South Central and into sex clubs and the homes of the fabulously wealthy, facing hippies, the mob, and old friends perhaps more dangerous than anyone else.

User reviews

LibraryThing member DPLyle
Easy Rawlins is back. This time Mosley’s iconic private eye is tasked with unraveling a mystery that begins when a PTSD-damaged Vietnam War vet asks his help in unraveling a mystery. It’s LA, 1969. The vet spins a story that makes little sense. He stumbles on a physical confrontation between a
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man and a woman in an isolated blood orange grove and he might have killed the attacker. Or maybe it’s simply another of the vivid combat flashbacks that plague the young man. Regardless, the girl is missing. Easy reluctantly takes on the case and, of course, enlists the help of Mouse, Fearless, and the other characters that populate his world. Blood Grove is dark and convoluted and so very well written. Highly recommended.

DP Lyle, award-winning author of the Jake Longly and Cain/Harper thriller series

This review copy was received from Mulholland Books.
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LibraryThing member sleahey
In this latest mystery about Easy Rawlins, Mosley has again followed the Dashiell Hammett tradition of a hard boiled detective, with the added complexity of addressing racial prejudice. There is a large cast of characters, many familiar from earlier Easy Rawlins novels, and a complicated plot, so
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that readers unfamiliar with Mosley's work may have a difficult time following the ins and outs of Rawlins's investigation. Set in the late 60's, the issues nonetheless seem extremely timely. The harassment and unfair treatment Rawlins suffers from police and others because of his skin color certainly reflect today's reality as well, and are especially cogent as described by the first person matter-of-fact account. The PTSD of the Vietnam vet client could just as easily relate to a more contemporary vet from the Middle East or Afghanistan. As for the mystery itself, all of the twists and turns will keep readers surprised, if not confused, and quickly turning pages to find out who dunnit.
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LibraryThing member froxgirl
Another welcome Easy Rawlins mystery, complete with femme fatales, family love for Feather, and a complex plot that requires your complete attention. It's now 1969, and a Vietnam vet reaches out to Easy because he THINKS he killed someone. Other than the whodunit joy, what makes this one exciting
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and unique is that Easy has to call in ALL the troops: Mouse, Charcoal Joe, Christmas Black, Fearless Joe, Jackson Blue, cops Anatole McCourt and Melvin Suggs, and: Frank Sinatra!
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LibraryThing member SamSattler
Blood Grove, Walter Mosley’s fifteenth Easy Rawlins Mystery, is the author’s first addition to the series since 2016. Mosley introduced Easy Rawlins to the world in 1990 with Devil in a Blue Dress, and although he is still best known for this series, Mosley has also published three Fearless
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Jones novels, six Leonid McGill novels, three Socrates Fortlow novels, and three short novels in the “Crosstown to Oblivion” series. That does it for series books, but Mosley has also written two short story collections, two books of erotica, six nonfiction books, two plays, one graphic novel, three science fiction novels, and eleven standalones (among which are my personal favorites). That’s a lot to choose from, but even with all of that, a new Easy Rawlins novel, especially after such a long wait, is a big deal to series fans.

Ezekiel “Easy” Porterhouse Rawlins is a black, unlicensed detective working the streets of Los Angeles. Now, keep in mind that Easy was born in late 1920 and that he is a World War II veteran who saw much of the fighting in that war’s European Theater. Easy, in fact, attributes his calmness under fire to those war experiences. As Blood Grove opens in 1969 Los Angeles, it looks like Easy is doing pretty well for himself. He lives in what most people would call a mansion inside a privately owned and well-guarded compound of similar homes in the Los Angeles hills with his adopted thirteen-year-old daughter. His adopted son (who does not make an appearance in the novel) is away and doing well on his own. Easy has plenty of money in his pocket; loyal, longtime friends all over the city; and enough business to keep him and his agency employees plenty busy. But the good times are just about to get complicated.

Things start to fall apart when an obviously shellshocked young white man comes to Easy for help. Craig Kilian wants to know if the black man he got into a fight with died from the knife wound to the chest that the man suffered during their scuffle over a white woman that the man was beating when Kilian came upon them in a deserted orange grove. The case has trouble — all kinds of trouble — written all over it, and Easy knows better than to get involved. Racial tension, an aftermath of the rioting in Watts a few years earlier, is still high, but Easy self-identifies as a combat veteran as much as he does with his race — and Craig Kilian, as it turns out, is a Vietnam War vet who needs help:

“Because of that bloody history, Craig Kilian was as much my brother in blood as any black man in the U.S. I had to help him because I could see his pain in my mirror.”

This earlier passage offers more insight into who Easy Rawlins is through his own eyes:

“I’m a black man closer to Mississippi midnight than to its yellow moon. Also I’m a westerner, a Californian formerly from the South - Louisiana and Texas to be exact. I’m a father, a reader, a private detective, and a veteran. I’m sure as shit a vet.”

Of course, nothing is a simple as the story Easy gets from Kilian…and Kilian is not exactly the innocent do-gooder he claims to be. There’s a lot going on in this sometimes over-complicated tale of interlocking crimes and criminals (keeping all the names straight can be difficult), but the real crux of the story is the intimate look at the social mores and race-relation issues of the day. Although race has always been an issue in the Easy Rawlins novels, Mosley seems to stress those issues more in these “woke” times than he has in previous novels, sometimes with longish passages such as this one:

“In America everything is about either race or money or some combination of the two. Who you are, what you have, what you look like, where your people came from, and what god looked over their breed — these were the most important questions. Added into that is the race of men and the race of women. The rich, famous, and powerful believe they have a race and the poor know for a fact they do. The thing about it is that most people have more than one race. White people have Italians, Germans, Irish, Poles, English, Scots, Portuguese, Russian, old-world Spaniards, new-world rich, and many combinations thereof. Black people have a color scheme from high yellow to moonless night, from octoroon to deepest Congo. And new-world Spanish have every nation from Mexico to Puerto Rico, from Columbia to Venezuela, each of which is a race of its own — not to mention the empires from Aztec to Mayan to Olmec.”

Or the slightly more optimistic (especially for the times):

“One thing I never forgot was that I was a black man in America, a country that had built greatness on the bulwarks of slavery and genocide. But even while I was aware of the United States’ crimes and criminals, still I had to admit that our nation offered bright futures for any woman or man with brains, elbow grease, and more than a little luck…”

Bottom Line: Blood Grove brings Easy Rawlins to his next chapter in life in a very satisfying manner, but for a better understanding of the plot, I suggest jotting down the names and affiliations of the various characters as soon as they appear in the story. There were too many for me to keep up with them comfortably, and I wish I had done that for myself before it was too late. As already mentioned, the “wokeness” of Blood Grove is more obvious than in earlier Easy Rawlins novels, but it all adds to the completeness of the character and our understanding of him. My favorite quote from the book is one of its saddest: “We had forever and now it’s gone.” That is so true of so many things.
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LibraryThing member RonWelton
Easy and Christmas Black come upon the murdered body of a young man who had hired WRENS-L to discover if he had stabbed to death a black man, known to him only as Alonzo. Easy had found an Alonzo dead by gun shot but he had not met the young man's description. He finds himself with, "two police
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departments, two dead bodies, maybe three more dead bodies, a gang of desperate heist men, a gangster, and a grieving mother pressing up against (him)."
At the end of the novel there are more dead and Easy decides that he now has a hippie in his family.
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LibraryThing member bfister
It’s 1969, and Easy Rawlings is keeping an eye on a household he can observe from his private investigation office. Hippies have moved in to his LA neighborhood, and one of them is tending something in a greenhouse. His observations are interrupted when a client arrives. Easy wonders what brought
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him to his door: he’s a white guy with a strange story. He thinks he stabbed a Black man who he encountered in an orange grove assaulting a white woman tied to a tree. He can’t be sure exactly what happened because he was knocked unconscious; he’s also not a reliable witness because hen’s recently returned from the Vietnam war and shows obvious signs of severe post-traumatic stress. That’s what compels Easy to take a case that doesn’t sound promising at all. He had, himself, just been visited by troubling memories of his own war in Europe.

His quest quickly becomes complicated as leads entangle him with unsavory characters and too many of the people he needs to find turn up dead. As usual he gets an assist from his buddies, familiar to readers who are catching up on the fifteenth book in the series, and the story takes detours to Easy’s hilltop retreat where he lives with his adopted daughter, Feather. She is being sought out by an uncle she has never met, a hippie who has broken with his family and wants to connect. Those detours, while no doubt of interest to fans as part of a long story arc, have a tendency to slow the pace, even as the case itself becomes a series of confusing switchbacks.

When the police aren’t trying to arrest him for being Black and driving a handsome Rolls Royce in neighborhoods where his presence alone is considered suspicious, he’s meeting with a detective he trusts who needs to solve some of the murders that seem to follow in Easy’s wake. The plot becomes tangled, as hard to follow as some of Chandler’s more Byzantine plots, and it doesn’t help that nearly every character involved in the case is double-crossing one another.

While the plot is nearly impossible to follow and the pacing is uneven, the backdrop of a time and place is vividly, often poetically evoked. Easy’s observations about the inescapable racism of the world he lives in – the world we still live in – are a welcome reminder that the search for justice that crime fiction readers so often crave is elusive, even when the case is closed.
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LibraryThing member alanteder
Easy Does It
Review of the Mulholland Books audiobook edition (February 2021) released simultaneously with the Mulholland Books hardcover

[3.5]
Blood Grove is a return after several years to Mosley's regular detective character Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, who started out as a scuffling WW2 ex-army vet
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desperate for work in late 1940s Los Angeles in Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). This latest book is set in the world of 1969's LA with the memories of the 1965 Watts riots still not forgotten. Easy has established himself well in this world with an official detective agency, an extended family and a comfortable house and lavish car (a payment for a previous case).

Although the client, a Viet War vet, is introduced early, the case takes a considerable time to get moving as Mosley revisits Easy's backstory and regular characters in a leisurely fashion. The puzzle of the case is that the shell-shocked Viet War vet may have a memory of knifing someone or may instead just be having PTSD flashbacks to combat. Easy gradually unravels a trail that leads back to an apparent heist with a falling out between heist crew members. There is, of course, a mysterious femme fatale who is central to the case.

I'll confess that I did find the convoluted story a bit hard to follow in audio format, and would suggest that a hard copy format might be preferable.

The narration by veteran actor Michael Boatman (who has narrated most of the Rawlins novels) was excellent though.

I listened to Blood Grove thanks to the Audible Daily Deal on June 12, 2021.
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LibraryThing member waldhaus1
An enjoyable romp through sixties LA. EZ reflects on his military experience helping drag him into an unexpected case followed by a series of murders. A variety of women help drag him into a case filled with racism and puzzles including the heist of an armored car.
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