This is the first Walter Mosley book I’ve read that didn’t feature his famed detective Easy Rawlins. I liked it, with some reservations.
We’re introduced to Joe King Oliver, a former NYPD detective who was framed and now has to make a living as a PI, trawling the streets of New York. Mosley’s Oliver is similar to Rawlins: a man who has been wronged yet has faults of his own. Mosley is quite good at making one feel sympathetic to his male protagonists while also keeping the reader at a distance. These are not great men, they’re men who have done bad things. But they are also being violated by men above them who have done bad things. It makes for true ambiguity and I appreciate that.
Plotting has never been Mosley’s strong suit and while he’s gotten better with time, this isn’t one of his best. There are two, maybe three threads running through and they occasionally bump up against each other but the continuous shifting to whatever Joe needs to do in that moment halts a lot of narrative momentum. And because there are so many threads, there area a lot of characters to keep track of, perhaps too many for a 322 page book.
Also, this isn’t a criticism per se but I’m not sure there are 10 payphones left in New York City, yet Oliver makes frequent use of them and it gave me a slight chuckle every time he did.
The mysteries themselves were somewhat interesting and that pushed this to four stars. What pushed it over the top was Mosley’s apt descriptions of Joe’s time in prison. It was brief but suitably haunting and while I didn’t enjoy those scenes or the effects they had on Joe, they were well written by a great author. The book in the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts so I’m okay giving this a weak 4 stars but 4 stars nonetheless.