With Farewell, Amethystine, Walter Mosley has done if not the impossible then the improbable: brought Easy Rawlins, avatar of midcentury noir cool, into the 1970s. In the Black private detective's boisterous 16th mystery, following Little Green, Rose Gold, and Charcoal Joe, among others, he may find his Los Angeles chockablock with hippies, but the racial tensions that have long complicated his job are still simmering.
It's 1970, Easy is 50 (just go with it), and his client is a beguiling woman whose ex-husband has gone missing. Easy phones his LAPD-commander friend Melvin Suggs but gets patched through to Captain Anatole McCourt, who says Suggs is on vacation--untrue, Easy knows. Nevertheless, Easy fills in McCourt on the missing person, and McCourt shares information useful enough to make Easy wonder why the captain is helping "a man like me." Turns out McCourt wants Easy's assistance: he's looking for Suggs's live-in girlfriend. As the novel's missing-persons tally climbs, so does the body count.
As ever, Mosley greases his limber plot with note- and beat-perfect dialogue, and his philosopher-poet's narration is rife with Easyisms (someone's smile "would have worked well on a cartoon snake"). Even devotees of this series may want to create a cheat sheet of the names cycling through Farewell, Amethystine; across the decades, Easy has, after all, racked up countless friends in high and low places: "The worst thing that a man in my situation could do would be to work with career criminals, cops, or strangers. I was working with all three." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer