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In this thrilling mystery, Easy Rawlins takes a job to find a missing attorney and his beautiful assistant—and faces danger around every corner.

It is the Summer of Love and Easy Rawlins is contemplating robbing an armored car. It's farther outside the law than Easy has ever traveled, but his daughter, Feather, needs a medical treatment that costs far more than Easy can earn or borrow in time. And his friend Mouse tells him it's a cinch.

Then another friend, Saul Lynx, offers a job that might solve Easy's problem without jail time. He has to track the disappearance of an eccentric, prominent attorney. His assistant of sorts, the beautiful "Cinnamon" Cargill, is gone as well. Easy can tell there is much more than he is being told: Robert Lee, his new employer, is as suspect as the man who disappeared. But his need overcomes all concerns, and he plunges into unfamiliar territory, from the newfound hippie enclaves to a vicious plot that stretches back to the battlefields of Europe.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. As shown in the superb 10th entry in Mosley's Easy Rawlins series (Devil in a Blue Dress, etc.), Easy's progress is never smooth and his achievements (responsible job, son and daughter both flowering, loving woman in his house, friends and even a grudging respect from local authorities) always fragile. Now, at the height of the Vietnam War era, it all threatens to collapse. Daughter Feather's mysterious illness is the proximate cause, and only an expensive Swiss clinic offers hope. Needing the nearly impossible sum of $35,000, Easy considers assisting his dangerous pal, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, with a robbery. But he decides instead to try his luck on a missing persons job brokered by white friend and PI Saul Lynx. Easy leaves Los Angeles for San Francisco, where his new employer puts him on the trail of a wealthy and eccentric lawyer and the lawyer's exotic lover, a girl known as Cinnamon, who have disappeared. As ever, Mosley is able to capture the era—hippies, Watts, communes—in brief strokes that provide a brilliant background to Easy's search for solutions to both a convoluted mystery and complex personal problems.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

The Easy Rawlins novels comment sharply on America in the second half of the twentieth century. Though Easy is African-American, both black and white readers have embraced the novels. Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), the first in the series, chronicled post-World War II America; last years Little Scarlet depicted the Watts Riots. This time, the Summer of Love, antiwar protests, and the nations growing awareness of civil rights form a convincing backdrop for Easys divided America. Some parts of the novel are uncharacteristically melodramatic and unsophisticated; The Washington Post even called Cinnamon an extraneous character. Minor complaints, really. Notes Entertainment Weekly: "Mosley could probably take an elderly Easy into the Rodney King era with no problem at all."

From Booklist

Mosley's long march through the 1960s continues as Easy Rawlins, now in his forties, finds himself thrust into multiple family crises. His daughter, Feather, has contracted a rare blood disease and is likely to die unless Easy can find a way to pay for treatment at a Swiss hospital. His lethal but loyal friend Mouse has just the ticket--an armored-car holdup--but Easy, determined to bring some stability to his life, opts instead to help a fellow sleuth track a vanished lawyer and his beautiful assistant, Cinnamon Cargill. The armored-car job might have been a wiser choice. Soon Easy has nothing but trouble: dead bodies turning up wherever he goes, a stone killer on his trail, and a potentially scandalous plot involving decades-old dealings with the Nazis. The trail takes Easy from L.A. to San Francisco and affords him his first bemused look at the burgeoning counterculture in Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury. Mosley's justly celebrated series typically juxtaposes human drama against a recognizable historical moment (last year's Little Scarlet took place during the Watts riots), revealing what history feels like from the perspective of an individual African American man. This time the historical moment is less vivid--the hippie encounters are mostly peripheral--but the human drama is more highly charged than ever. Readers accustomed to the aggressive interaction between history and character may feel less engaged this time, but the melancholic, inward-turning Easy who emerges here offers his own multidimensional rewards. Like the best crime series, the Rawlins novels continue to evolve in surprising ways. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Other Reviews

"Mosley could probably take an elderly Easy into the Rodney King era with no problem at all" -- Gilbert Cruz, Entertainment Weekly

"Mosley s explosively distilled prose [is] as powerful as homemade booze. -- Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune

"One of the most humane, insightful, powerful prose stylists working today in any genre . Be hip, read this book. -- Jesse Sublett, Austin Chronicle

"With every book Mosley gets better, and Cinnamon Kiss is one of his best. Read it." -- -Ron Bernas, Detroit Free Press

About the Author

Walter Mosley is one of America's most celebrated and beloved writers. A Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, he has won numerous awards, including the Anisfield-Wolf Award, a Grammy, a PEN USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, and several NAACP Image Awards. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. His short fiction has appeared in a wide array of publications, including The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Playboy, and his nonfiction has been published in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and The Nation. He is the author of Down the River unto the Sea. He lives in New York City.