Mosley mystery blooms amid flower children
Cinnamon Kiss
By Walter Mosley
Little, Brown, 312 pp., $24.95
In last year's excellent ''Little Scarlet," Walter Mosley's world-weary detective Ezekiel ''Easy" Rawlins navigated the smoldering physical, psychological, and emotional remnants of the devastating 1965 Watts riots. Now, ''Cinnamon Kiss," the 10th novel of Mosley's tireless series, finds Easy among the hippies and dreamers during the Summer of Love. There have been changes in Easy's life. He's the supervising senior-head custodian of Sojourner Truth Junior High School, making him the highest-ranking African-American at the predominantly black school.
And, after years as an unlicensed private detective, he's finally earned legal status after helping the city's police department quash a rumor that might have reignited the racially charged riots.
Still, Easy's life is always stalked by heartbreak. This time, his adopted daughter Feather is gravely ill with a mysterious blood ailment, and he's desperate for money to get her treatment at an expensive clinic in Switzerland. As the novel begins, Easy is so frantic, he's mulling a scheme to rob an armored car, a plan concocted by his murderous buddy Raymond ''Mouse" Alexander, whom Easy describes as ''death personified."
Fortunately, a fellow investigator makes Easy a better offer, one that comes with a $1,500 down payment and the possibility of a $10,000 paycheck. Even after his friend explains the client's name is Robert E. Lee, Easy is undeterred. As usual, it's a job best suited for a black man, who can inconspicuously move with guile within his own community, whereas a white person would only arouse fear and suspicion.
So Easy travels to San Francisco to meet Lee, a small, smug man he instantly dislikes. Lee wants Easy to find Axel Bowers, a liberal lawyer, a briefcase filled with missing documents, and Philomena Cargill, known as Cinnamon, Bowers's assistant and possible lover.
As Easy begins his labyrinthine search for Bowers and Cinnamon, he finds a city unlike any he has ever seen. In the Haight-Ashbury district, homes are splashed with various colors, with all kinds of music spilling from open windows. Young people, all with long hair, wear tie-dye clothing, if they're bothering to wear much of anything. And the neighborhood is integrated -- black, white, Hispanic, and Asian -- in a way Easy never thought possible.
As with every novel in this series, Mosley adheres to a long-established formula. There are, of course, the disappearances of Bowers and Cinnamon to be unraveled. That side of the story gets more lurid and lethal -- with Nazi connections, cold-eyed assassins, and an increasing body count -- the deeper Easy sinks into his investigation.
Yet, as usual, Mosley pays as much attention to the late 1960s historical setting. With the nation rocked by social upheaval from the Vietnam War and the burgeoning civil rights movement, Easy witnesses a country cannibalizing itself. It's both exciting and troubling, but for a man who has struggled for equality his entire life, it also hints that America just may find a way to finally live up to its idealized self-image of a more perfect union.
Anyone can write a decent detective story, but Mosley is a cunning storyteller more concerned with the more profound mysteries of American lives, flawed by racism and mistrust. With ''Cinnamon Kiss," he once again proves that he may sooner run out of color-coded titles than gripping stories to tell in this deservedly acclaimed series.
