White Butterfly (Easy Rowlins Mysteries)

This is the third of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins novels I’ve read. I thought it was better than Red Death but not as good as Devil in a Blue Dress. Mosley’s prose is great, the characters are fiery, the sense of the time and place are terrific and the plot rattles along nicely.

I did have some problems with this one though. I like a noir tale but this one gets really dark and misogynistic. Three murdered black girls have no back story at all and are just there as a plot device but I guess that’s reinforcing the point that the police are only interested when a white girl is killed.

Throughout the novel, Rawlins treats his own wife with complete contempt. In one particularly horrible scene he rapes her. I guess Mosley is trying to show us how brutal Rawlins’ life has been and how it’s damaged him, but by the end of the story my hero is his psychopathic friend Mouse (who would kill you if you looked at him funny).

Really well written, but nasty. I’ll try at least one more to see if Rawlins gets some sort of redemption.