A King Oliver Novel

Available January 28, 2025

In the latest from “mystery master” Walter Mosley, a family member’s terminal illness leads P.I. Joe King Oliver to the investigation of his life: tracking down his long-lost father, and meanwhile, a new case pits King’s professional responsibility against his own moral code.
—TheWashington Post

Joe King Oliver’s beloved Grandma B has found a tumor, and at her age, treatment is high-risk. She’s lived life fully and without regrets, and now has only a single, dying wish: to see her long-lost son. King has been estranged from his father, Chief Odin Oliver, since he was a young boy. He swore to never speak to the man again when he was taken away in handcuffs. But now, Grandma B’s pure ask has opened King’s heart, and through his hunt, he gains a deeper understanding of his father as a complicated, righteous man—a man defined by women, a man protected by women, a man he wants to know. Although Chief was released from prison years ago, he’s been living underground ever since. Now, King must not only find his father, but prove his innocence, and protect the future of his entire family.

Simultaneously, King finds himself in a moral bind. Marigold Hart, the wife of a powerful Californian billionaire, has gone missing, along with their seven-year-old daughter. Orr is brutish and dangerous, and King realizes after locating her that it’s in her best interest to stay hidden. But are his motives pure? There is something magnetic about Marigold; he can’t help but want her near.

In the latest installment in the Joe King Oliver series, no good deed goes unpunished. Emotionally stirring, pulse-pounding, and undeniably sexy, Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right shows Walter Mosley at his best.

EVENTBRITE.COM

Inventing the Page: Michael Connelly, Laurie R. King and Walter Mosley
Author/Director Nicholas Meyer is moderator for an evening with 3 Grand Masters of suspense at the Skirball’s Magnin Auditorium.

In Mosley’s new Easy Rawlins novel, “Farewell, Amethystine,” his hero is pulled into a missing-persons case that turns into much more.

Review by E.A. Aymar, The Washington Post
May 25, 2024 

A crop of new, talented crime-fiction writers has begun to make its mark — appearing on bestseller lists, earning award nominations and filling spots at respected book festivals. This is encouraging, even as the genre’s lodestars remain. Smoothly gliding through this chorus of hungry voices is Walter Mosley. His latest Easy Rawlins mystery, “Farewell, Amethystine,” shows that he is still at the top of a genre he helped to pioneer.

Read the rest of the review on washingtonpost.com

Available: June 4, 2024

Easy Rawlins’ latest client sends him down a warren of memory and nostalgia, blinding him to reason and risk, from “master of the genre,” (Washington Post) Walter Mosley.

January 1970 finds Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, LA’s premier Black detective, at 50 years of age despite all expectations.  He has a loving family, a beautiful home, and a thriving investigation agency.  All is right with the world… and then Amethystine Stoller, his own personal Helen of Troy, arrives. Her ex-husband is missing. A simple enough case. But even as Easy takes his first step in the investigation he trips.  He falls into the memory of things past. Little things, like loss, love, a world war, and a hunger that has eaten at him since he was a Black boy on his own on the streets of Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas.

The missing ex, a young white man named Curt Fields, is found dead. Easy’s only real friend in the LAPD, Melvin Suggs, has gone into hiding rather than allow his femme fatale wife to go to the gas chamber.  And that’s only the beginning.

Easy finds himself pressed into a reckoning. All of his success cannot succor his heart. The 1970’s have ushered in new expectations of men and women, Black and White, and Easy has to make a choice that will almost certainly hasten a permanent descent, one that might sunder his soul.

Intergalactic visions, deadly threats, and explosive standoffs between mostly good and nearly completely evil converge in an alternative fiction novel that could only be conceived by the inimitable Walter Mosley, one of the country’s most beloved and acclaimed writers.

Martin Just wakes up one morning after what feels like, and might actually be, a centuries-long sleep with two new innate pieces of knowledge: Humanity is a virus destined to destroy all existence. And that he is the Cure.

Martin, his wife, and his two children are the only Black family on their neighborhood block in the Hollywood hills of Los Angeles. Suddenly, Martin is both father and Antibody, husband and Cure, occasionally slipping into an alternate consciousness – equipped with unprecedented physical strength – to violently defend them.

The family is stalked by Tor Waxman – the pale, white-haired embodiment of death who wears a dapper suit, carries a cane, and seeks to destroy all life with his fatal touch. Martin must convince his family of the danger and get them to engage with him in a battle beyond all imagining. Mosley effortlessly marries the sublime and the pedestrian: from monumental battles with truly universal stakes to the banality of standoffs with neighborhood police patrols, and the quotidian yet joyfully intimate conversations the family shares at home while gathered for dinner.

With his boundless talent and skilled range, Walter Mosley brings an ethereal, incisive look at a primal struggle driven by the spirit of the universe, in the vein of masters Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, and Jeff VanderMeer. Expansive and innovative, sexy and satirical, Touched brilliantly imagines the ways in which human life and technological innovation threaten existence itself.

Grove Atlantic

In this highly anticipated sequel from Edgar Award-winning “master of craft and narrative,” Walter Mosley, Joe King Oliver is entangled in a dangerous case when he’s asked to investigate whether a white nationalist is being unjustly set up. (National Book Foundation)

When friend of the family and multi-billionaire Roger Ferris comes to Joe with an assignment, he’s got no choice but to accept, even if the case is a tough one to stomach. White nationalist Alfred Xavier Quiller has been accused of murder and the sale of sensitive information to the Russians. Ferris has reason to believe Quiller’s been set up and he needs King to see if the charges hold.

This linear assignment becomes a winding quest to uncover the extent of Quiller’s dealings, to understand Ferris’ skin in the game, and to get to the bottom of who is working for whom. Even with the help of bodyguard and mercenary Oliya Ruez—no regular girl Friday—the machine King’s up against proves relentless and unsparing. As King gets closer to exposing the truth, he and his loved ones barrel towards grave danger.

Mosley once again proves himself a “master of craft and narrative” (National Book Foundation) in this carefully plotted mystery that is at once a classic caper, a family saga and an examination of fealty, pride and how deep debt can go.

Walter Mosley’s infamous detective Easy Rawlins is back, with a new mystery to solve on the sun-soaked streets of Southern California.

Ezekiel “Easy” Porterhouse Rawlins is an unlicensed private investigator turned hard-boiled detective always willing to do what it takes to get things done in the racially charged, dark underbelly of Los Angeles.

But when Easy is approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran—a young white man who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a white woman from a black man—he knows he shouldn’t take the case.

Though he sees nothing but trouble in the brooding ex-soldier’s eyes, Easy, a vet himself, feels a kinship form between them. Easy embarks on an investigation that takes him from mountaintops to the desert, through South Central and into sex clubs and the homes of the fabulously wealthy, facing hippies, the mob, and old friends perhaps more dangerous than anyone else.

Set against the social and political upheaval of the late 1960s, Blood Grove is ultimately a story about survival, not only of the body but also the soul.

Widely hailed as “incomparable” (Chicago Tribune) and “dazzling” (Tampa Bay Times), Walter Mosley proves that he’s at the top of his game in this bold return to the endlessly entertaining series that has kept fans on their toes for years.

The National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, announced that it will award Walter Mosley with the 2020 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL). Mosley has written more than sixty critically acclaimed books across subject, genre, and category. Walter Mosley’s 1990 debut novel Devil in a Blue Dress was the first in the bestselling mystery series featuring detective Easy Rawlins, and launched Mosley into literary prominence. Mosley’s books have been translated into twenty-five languages, and he has won numerous awards, including, but not limited to, an Edgar Award for Down the River Unto the Sea, an O. Henry Award, The Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, a Grammy®, several NAACP Image awards, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020, he was named the recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The DCAL will be presented to Mosley by two-time National Book Award Finalist Edwidge Danticat. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK (AP) — Walter Mosley is receiving an honorary National Book Award, cited for dozens of books which range from science fiction and erotica to the acclaimed mystery series that has followed the life of Los Angeles private detective Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. Read the rest of this entry »