What else? We learn that Easy has set up a detective agency with two other men – Whisper Natly and Saul Lynx. Charcoal Joe has a lady on the outside, Jasmine Palmas-Hardy (and if you’ve never read Mosley and if Easy Rawlins didn’t tip you off, Mosley has as fine a way with names as Thomas Pynchon), and she’s a sort of fixer if you will, and the young scientist in the frame for the murder is her son.

Very quickly, though, and again as you might expect, the plot whips tighter than a wet twisted towel and whipcrack snaps just as smartly.

She gives him a potion and that helps him see a few things more clearly as he does his best to work Charcoal Joe’s case. He pays a visit to Mama Joe, the witch who he and Mouse first met in Gone Fishin’ (the fourth, but chronologically first Easy Rawlins novel) and learns she has some troubles of her own. But nothing is ever easy for Easy and alongside this case, he discovers early on that Bonnie, the woman he was gearing up to propose to, is leaving him for another man (in a callback to Blonde Faith). The gist of the case is: Joe wants Easy to investigate a murder – two men found dead in a beach house – and exonerate the son of his friend, an up and coming young black man who is doing well for himself as a scientist and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He makes thing happen where no-one else sees possibilities.” He’s also somewhat dangerous himself, having saved Easy’s life (unbeknownst to Easy) when he delivered a couple of names into Mouse’s hands, two guys out to kill Easy – and so of course Mouse offed them as surely as he would finish all the food on his plate. This time around, Easy is hired by Mouse, his buddy and one hell of a scary dude, to help out a guy called Charcoal Joe, and Joe is “what you’d call a mastermind. By which we mean to say, Mosley’s Easy Rawlins novels are complex and Charcoal Joe is no exception in that regard either. We also know that over the course of the last twenty plus years (Mosley’s first Easy Rawlins outing, Devil in a Blue Dress, was published in 1995) Easy Rawlins has built himself quite the network – and Mosley expects you to keep up, as he should, he ain’t writing for fools. Easy Rawlins has a family, of sorts, an adopted daughter, a girlfriend, an adopted son (who we left making his way to Alaska in the last book, Rose Gold). Easy Rawlins is a black man in a very racist America so we know he’ll be confronted by that. Easy Rawlins is a detective, for one thing, so we’ll know that there will be a case he has to investigate. Walter Mosley is about as prolific as Stephen King and this being the 14th Easy Rawlins mystery, we have an idea, don’t we, of what we’ll get.

Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley