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Is This The End of Easy Rawlins?

"Blonde Faith" (Little, Brown, 310 pages, $25.99), by Walter Mosley

We may have seen the last of Easy Rawlins, the unlicensed private detective-hero of one of the finest series in the history of American crime fiction.

Walter Mosley, Easy's creator, has said he may be done with Easy. And the surprise ending of the new novel in the series, "Blonde Faith," makes it unlikely that the he will reappear.

When we first met Easy 10 books ago, it was 1948. He was a war hero - young, proud and confident, albeit uncertain why he had fought for a country that oppressed him because of the color of his skin. Still, Los Angeles was a good place for an African American to be back then. They had arrived by the thousands from the deep South, hungry for jobs in the bustling defense plants and eager for a life in the sunshine in a city without a long history of animosity toward blacks.

"Blonde Faith" is set two decades later, in the aftermath of the Watts riots. Los Angeles is a menacing place now. And Easy, wounded by decades of disappointment in his friends, his adopted city, his country and himself, is a tortured, though still noble, soul.

He feels as if he were "were witnessing the devolution of a culture," Easy says. "Even Otis Redding moaning about the dock of the bay on tinny but loud speakers spoke of a world that was grinding to a halt."

And if that weren't enough, his heart is rent with memories of Bonnie, the love of his life, who left him at the end of "Cinnamon Kiss" (2005).

As "Blonde Faith" opens, one of Easy's friends, a hulking Vietnam veteran named Christmas Black, has gone missing. And so has Easy's lifelong pal, the unpredictably violent Raymond "Mouse" Alexander. Easy sets out to find them and soon finds himself mixed up with homicidal cops, drug dealing former special forces officers and alluring white women.

"Blonde Faith" is a sharply plotted novel superbly written, but as with every Easy Rawlins novel, the best part is the character himself - a model of intelligence and integrity trying to do the right thing in a dangerous, uncaring world.

If it is, indeed, the last book in the series, it represents the completion of a body of work far more serious and successful than almost anything else in the crime genre. Taken together, the Easy Rawlins novels can be read as an epic story of American race relations from World War II to the end of the 1960s.

By Bruce DeSilva

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