FAREWELL, AMETHYSTINE

The latest Easy Rawlins book finds him, at age 50, more at peace with himself and the world than before. Somehow you know that won’t last.

“There I was, a Black man in 1970, driving through the countryside with a corpse in the trunk. I had a trick or two up my sleeve and a loaded .38 in my pocket.” If you had to guess who this speaker might be, it wouldn’t take long before you came around to Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, the endearing private detective who’s the central figure in an absorbing chronicle of urban Los Angeles that’s, so far, spanned four decades. This installment 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 could use some 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. It spoils little to disclose that the cases are related—and tangled in a welter of desperate gamblers and sleazy blackmailers through which Easy must uneasily navigate as he fends off the usual obstacles of racist cops and violent thugs with help from his friend Fearless Jones. This entry in the Easy epic may sometimes feel a bit by-the-numbers, but in the end, it also feels somewhat like a prelude to a potentially fresh—and dangerous—chapter in Rawlins’ life.

Things are never simple for Easy Rawlins. But his creator remains a master of the genre.