Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley

I used to read Walter Mosley books regularly - at least the Easy Rawlins series, which I devoured in the '90s. But first kids, then my exile from editorial work slowed down my reading - and mysteries took the first and most severe hit in that slowdown.

So I now realize that 2007's Blonde Faith - the tenth book in the series, of sixteen novels and some short fiction so far - is the first book in this series that I've read in probably twenty years and only the third Mosley book I've read at all this century.

Add to that the fact that I'm a white East Coast guy reading a mystery series about a Black detective in historical LA and points nearby, and I might need to warn you that you have no reason to take my opinion as having any weight whatsoever.

With that said: this book is set in early 1967. As usual, the series hero is Easy Rawlins, a man originally from Houston, a WWII veteran, and a guy who's tangled in his own head all of the time. (That's been true throughout the series: Easy is a smart man who is good at the private-detecting work he does, off and on, but not as good at getting through the interpersonal stuff in his own life.) He's forty-seven at this point, though still, as seen in this book, chasing women that are literally younger than his own stepson. (Catching them, too: it's that kind of book.)

That also means that this series, since it's in the first person from Easy's POV, gets stuck in his head. It's been a long time since I read the earlier books, so I can't make a comparison, but this one doesn't have as much plot as you might expect from its three hundred pages. It's basically: Easy looks for two guys, both old friends, and eventually finds them together. Some other things happen along the way, but not a whole lot of complications or sideplots.

Meanwhile, Easy is tormented because the great love of his life - or at least his recent life; he has capacity to chase women in bulk and has for decades at this point - Bonnie Shay, is getting married to her other boyfriend, an African prince. There's some complicated backstory there that might have come up in previous books or might have been between books: Easy's daughter Feather needed some tricky medical treatment, and the prince paid for it, but his price was Bonnie, who he took from Easy at that point. (But he's supposedly a good guy, so this might be somewhat colored by Easy's memory and prejudices.)

The two missing men are Christmas Black, a former Green Beret caught up somehow (on the "trying to stop them" end) with a nasty ring smuggling drugs via Vietnam, and Easy's old best friend Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, a gangster who is accused of killing Pericles Tarr. Easy tracks down Tarr, who turns out to not be dead, and meets the smugglers, who are posing as Army officers. As required by a mystery novel, the two plots somewhat intersect, because Black and Mouse know each other.

Easy's voice is compelling and believable, but I found him more than a bit whiny here, especially for a guy who bags one hottie (the woman of the title), is well on his way to a relationship with a college-aged additional hottie, and flirts very successfully with one or two others I can think of - all while being despondent because he lost Bonita entirely because he didn't bother to get in touch with her for an extended period of time. A man can definitely protest too much.

And the mystery is a bit thin here. Easy is just trying to find two men, who he's pretty sure will be not that far away and who are both so good at violence that it's unlikely they'll be in any serious trouble. And that turns out to be the case. The tension is mostly about Bonnie, and about Easy's own internal demons - this is closer to a literary novel than a mystery. I do like literary novels, admittedly, but I prefer their heroes not be utterly obnoxious twerps, and Easy is really close to that line here.