Cinnamon Kiss: A Novel - Hardcover

Mosley, Walter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316073024 ISBN 13: 9780316073028

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2005

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Reviews

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 year’s Little Scarlet depicted the Watts Riots. This time, the Summer of Love, antiwar protests, and the nation’s growing awareness of civil rights form a convincing backdrop for Easy’s 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."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Walter Mosley's thrillers should be the literary equivalent of Milk Duds, but there's something surprisingly nutritious about them. Take Cinnamon Kiss, his latest novel starring Easy Rawlins, a black PI in Los Angeles. It's hard to imagine a collection of more hackneyed elements: Easy has to raise $35,000 fast to pay Swiss doctors to save his adopted daughter. An old friend gets him an assignment to track down papers that tie a wealthy family to an incriminating Nazi past. Everywhere Easy goes, darned if he doesn't arrive just moments after a crucial source has been murdered. And now there's a vicious assassin after him, too!

It's a sugar high of a plot, written out in Mosley's cool prose, which teeters on the edge of noir parody: "This was an ugly job and it was likely to get uglier," Easy tells us without flinching. Describing a tough friend, he says, "He could kill a man and then go take a catnap without the slightest concern." Lamenting the dangerous choices posed by his daughter's disease, he thinks, "Nearly twenty years of trying to be an upright citizen making an honest wage and it all disappears because of a bucket full of bad blood." With a voice like that, a rising body count, a dying little girl, a craven assassin and a soupçon of Nazism, you've got yourself a perfect book for the flight from D.C. to L.A. But wait, there's more -- and that's Mosley's genius: The entertainment takes place right in the cross hairs, while rich, complex issues dart by on the periphery.

Despite his enormous popularity with white readers -- the previous Easy Rawlins novel, Little Scarlet, was a national bestseller -- Mosley hasn't crossed over in a way that renders race irrelevant. All the latent humiliations of racism are still here: the clammy atmosphere of suspicion, an economy that won't give blacks enough traction to get ahead. But Mosley conveys this like a long-suffering ambassador to the Land of White People, explaining the frustrations of being black in America with wry wit and repressed bitterness.

Easy plays a similar mediating role in the world of this novel, which is set in 1966. Much of the area where he lives has been destroyed by the Watts riots. In this vast expression of self-destructive racial anger that Easy understands and laments, he see himself as a go-between. At the 80 percent black school where he manages the maintenance staff, he says, "I could translate the rules and expectations of the institution that many southern Negroes just didn't understand." And the white principal appreciates what she calls his "ghetto pedagogy," his ability to explain to her the nuances of African American culture. "You're right, Mr. Rawlins," she says one day. "And you're white," he replies with a little laugh -- enough to remind her of how things are without shattering their rapport.

But he's thoroughly capable of expressing his frustrations in language stronger than friendly wordplay. While pursuing a lead with a friend in downtown L.A., he suddenly notices two policemen eyeing him. "Most Americans wouldn't understand why two well-dressed men would have to explain why they were standing on a public street," he writes. "But most Americans cannot comprehend the scrutiny that black people have been under since the days we were dragged here in bondage. Those two cops felt fully authorized to stop us with no reason and no warrant. They felt that they could question us and search us and cart us off to jail if there was the slightest flaw in how we explained our business. Even with all the urgency I felt at that moment I had a small space to hate what those policemen represented in my life. But I could hate as much as I wanted: I still didn't have the luxury to defy their authority."

What a deftly handled moment, and moments like that are sprinkled all over this mostly silly tale of snooping through San Francisco and L.A., interviewing hippies and discovering dead bodies. The only real flaw is Cinnamon, a gorgeous young woman who gives the book a lusty title and a wild sex scene, but nothing really important (which is to say nothing about the importance of wild sex in general). She's a friend of the liberal lawyer who disappeared with those Nazi papers that Easy must find. Late in the novel, while Easy's girlfriend is patiently nursing his adopted daughter in Switzerland, Cinnamon and Easy enjoy a multi-orgasmic evening "with no impediments of love at all." It's a scene that inspires groans of a different sort. "Cinnamon's kiss was a spiritual thing," Mosley writes, evoking -- what? -- the Crucifixion, the Ark of the Covenant? "It was like the sudden and unexpected appeasement between the east and west." But, in fact, he's a lot more interested in the sudden and unexpected appeasement between her thighs. "A barrier fell away," he says of this woman he barely knows; "forgiveness flooded my heart, and somewhere I was granted redemption for all my transgressions." Sure, once you get rid of those "impediments of love," that always happens.

If only Mosley were as sensitive to the function of sexism as he is to the function of racism. When Easy's girlfriend returns from her weeks-long rescue mission in Switzerland, he piously throws her out for being disloyal. Mosley doesn't seem to hear the appalling hypocrisy of this move, a misstep that makes what's intended as a dramatic conclusion merely galling. But that's Easy: deeply sympathetic, deeply flawed, always engaging.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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.

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316073024
• ISBN 13: 9780316073028
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320