In this book Easy and Mouse go back to his home town. This book goes back in time and catches you on these two and how their friendship came to be. This right before Mouse is going to get married and he believes his step dad owes him money from when his mother died. Easy doesn’t won’t to go but does. He starts to regret it on the drive there when they pick up two hitch hikers. From there for Easy it just goes downhill. He is able to figure some things out about his life but he knows Mouse is up to no good. Needless to say all of Easy fears or thoughts come true. Too many things happen to the point that it makes him sick. On the drive home Mouse tells him what happened and really Easy is too scared to do anything else but listen. He knows friends or not he could be next. The wedding comes and after that Easy leaves and then within the year he is in the army and once the war is over he moves to L.A. This is a good book to get you caught up on the early life of these two Easy and Mouse. A good and exciting story.
I was on an Easy Rawlins tear there for awhile. Read each one. This one, though it wasn't apparently published first, was the first one, I believe. In any case, it is Mouse and Easy in their very young days, and is not as polished as the later books. But the craft is still incredible. It's kind of like that first season of "Seinfeld," in literary form. You can see where things are going very vividly, but they are not yet solidified. I read this years ago, but the one thing I remember is a paragraph of prose in which there is a gunfight at a house in the woods. The writing in that short stretch is as spare and perfect and suspenseful, I think, as any great book you could name. Having said that, this is not as good a book as "real" Easy Rawlins mysteries. This is more back-story than mystery. But if you love the Easy character, it's very good.
Six books in to the history of Ezekial Rawlins we are treated to his origin story, a spontaneous road trip with his violent friend Raymond Alexander to ask his step-daddy for some money for his wedding.What Mosley has done with this book is throw away the crime and mystery plotting and concentrate on the coming of age nature of the journey, there's much greater focus on what it meant to be a young black man in 1939 Texas, and as such it's a fascinating addition to the series that focuses on what Mosley does best.
—Tfitoby
I've got a pile of Walter Mosley's books to work through and although I had read a couple of the stand-alone books and one Easy Rawlins before this, this took me back to the beginning. If we were discussing comic books this would be an " origin" story set back before WW2 in rural Texas.This lacks the style of the Mosley books I have already read and is very dark in tone. If I was not already a fan I doubt that this would have turned me into one, but, given that I am it fills a hole in the back story and explains some aspects of Easy's relationship with Mouse.
—John
I've rarely loved the mystery component of the Easy Rawlins detective novels, so this origin story was pure enjoyment. I can't say that it's a totally necessary entry in the Easy Rawlins series, since the story had been mostly explained in Easy's reminiscing about Texas, Mouse and EttaMae. Great atmosphere, and well-written characters. The author pulls off a neat trick of being written from the perspective of an older Easy looking back on his youth, but before we first meet him in "Devil in a Blue Dress". Bravo!
—Martin
