Though Mosley has written over 30
novels, I’ve read only The Last Days of
Ptolemy Grey, a book I loved. His Easy
Rawlins series has devoted followers so when the opportunity arose to read a new
sample of Mosley’s detective fiction, I thought I’d take it. Though not unenjoyable, I found it
unexceptional.
When Joe King Oliver was a New
York police detective, he was framed for a sexual assault. While in Rikers, he experienced brutality and
solitary confinement and emerged a damaged man.
Eleven years later, he is a private investigator. After receiving a letter from a woman who
admits to having been forced to entrap him, he decides to try and find out who
betrayed him. As he seeks justice for
himself, he also sets out to help A Free Man, a Black radical journalist, whom
he sees as a victim of injustice like himself.
Oliver is an interesting enough
character. His time in prison affected
him dramatically; he was released with both physical and mental scars. He asserts that “It was in that stink that I
became a murderer-in-waiting.” At
different times he describes himself as a “creature formed by my imprisonment”
and a “madman created by Rikers.” He
wants to be exonerated and maybe even reinstated and he wants to remain on the
right side of the law in his quest for justice, but that becomes increasingly difficult
as his investigations progress. He
realizes he needs help and ends up hiring a sociopath as a sidekick: “walking down those chilly autumn streets
with a man so evil that no crime deterred him meant that I had taken the first
steps on a different path.”
Oliver is a dynamic character
capable of introspection and self-examination.
The book opens with his identifying a major weakness; he speaks of his
desire for women: “It didn’t take but a
smile and wink for me . . . to walk away from duties and promises, vows and
common sense.” He goes as far as to
compare himself to a dog in his “fang-baring hunt lust.” Throughout the book he has a number of
enlightening moments. For example, “I
realized that I felt alone most of the time . . . I was alone because no one
else seemed to know what was in my heart.”
Later, when “propelled by forces [he] could not control,” he has another
epiphany: “It occurred to me that my
whole life had been organized around the guiding principle of being completely
in charge of whatever I did. . . . The problem was that no man is an island; no
man can control his fate. No woman
either, or gnat or redwood tree.”
There is a large cast of
secondary characters, some of whom come and go quickly, so it becomes difficult
not to be confused. One character who is
memorable is Melquarth Frost, Oliver’s sociopathic partner, who believes that “’People
should break the law if it doesn’t suit them’” and that beating a person is a
form of communication because “’Anything one man does that another man
understands can be defined as language.’”
The other character who made an impression on me is Aja-Denise, Oliver’s
17-year-old daughter, who works part-time as her father’s receptionist. Oliver’s love for his daughter is
unquestionable (“If I had to spend the rest of my life in a moldy coffin buried
under ten feet of concrete, with only polka music to listen to, I would have
done that for her.”) and his interactions with her are highlights of the book.
The book examines the themes of
corruption and justice. Corruption is so
pervasive that one wonders if there is anyone who is innocent of its
taint. The book emphasizes the extent to
which people’s lives can be affected by corruption; Oliver was “beaten,
scarred, disgraced, imprisoned, and had [his] marriage torn apart” but Burns
and Miranda stand out as victims of corruption.
Justice does not seem to exist much in the world Oliver exposes, but he
decides to do what he can: “[A Free Man
and I] would never receive justice from law enforcement or the courts and so
the only thing that could be done was to take the law into our own hands.”
The novel is fast-paced and keeps
the reader’s interest, though the identity of one of the individuals involved
in framing Oliver is rather obvious. What
becomes irritating is Oliver’s constantly keeping information from the reader. For example, he mentions enlisting someone’s
aid in a plan he has formulated, but it is not until later that the nature of
that aid is clarified. This is obviously
a technique to create suspense but its repeated use becomes annoying. At one point, Oliver observes that “in order
to truly be with somebody you have to be in their mind,” but he keeps the
reader at a distance, revealing only some of what he is thinking. Perhaps this distance is the reason why I
didn’t ever really feel connected with the protagonist.
I would certainly recommend this
book but I wouldn’t describe it using superlatives.
Note: I received an eARC of the book from the publisher via NetGalley.
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