It’s 1969, and Easy Rawlings is keeping an eye on a household he can observe from his private investigation office. Hippies have moved in to his LA neighborhood, and one of them is tending something in a greenhouse. His observations are interrupted when a client arrives. Easy wonders what brought him to his door: he’s a white guy with a strange story. He thinks he stabbed a Black man who he encountered in an orange grove assaulting a white woman tied to a tree. He can’t be sure exactly what happened because he was knocked unconscious; he’s also not a reliable witness because hen’s recently returned from the Vietnam war and shows obvious signs of severe post-traumatic stress. That’s what compels Easy to take a case that doesn’t sound promising at all. He had, himself, just been visited by troubling memories of his own war in Europe. returnreturnHis quest quickly becomes complicated as leads entangle him with unsavory characters and too many of the people he needs to find turn up dead. As usual he gets an assist from his buddies, familiar to readers who are catching up on the fifteenth book in the series, and the story takes detours to Easy’s hilltop retreat where he lives with his adopted daughter, Feather. She is being sought out by an uncle she has never met, a hippie who has broken with his family and wants to connect. Those detours, while no doubt of interest to fans as part of a long story arc, have a tendency to slow the pace, even as the case itself becomes a series of confusing switchbacks. returnreturnWhen the police aren’t trying to arrest him for being Black and driving a handsome Rolls Royce in neighborhoods where his presence alone is considered suspicious, he’s meeting with a detective he trusts who needs to solve some of the murders that seem to follow in Easy’s wake. The plot becomes tangled, as hard to follow as some of Chandler’s more Byzantine plots, and it doesn’t help that nearly every character involved in the case is double-crossing one another.returnreturnWhile the plot is nearly impossible to follow and the pacing is uneven, the backdrop of a time and place is vividly, often poetically evoked. Easy’s observations about the inescapable racism of the world he lives in – the world we still live in – are a welcome reminder that the search for justice that crime fiction readers so often crave is elusive, even when the case is closed.