|
Joe was already skittish and uneasy in his own skin, and he
certainly didn’t trust very readily. That’s what happens
when you’re wrongly accused of a crime but you spend ninety
days in Riker’s anyway, in solitary confinement, listening
to other men scream, waiting to be killed. Yes, though that
all happened more than a decade ago, it still simmered in
Joe Oliver’s soul.
But that letter.
It came from a woman who wrote that her name was Beatrice
but she was Nathali Malcolm once, long ago, when she was
coerced into setting him up. When her lies and accusations
sent an innocent man to prison.
Through the years, Joe couldn’t figure out why it happened,
let alone who’d done it. He left Riker’s broken, with a lost
marriage, a lost NYPD job… just lost. Weeks after his
release, his only friend stepped in quietly and helped Joe
with a PI business, and that’s where Joe was when he read
the letter.
He didn’t want revenge – not completely, anyhow – but he did
want his name cleared. This letter could do that, just as it
could stir up a thousand bad dreams. So when a beautiful
woman came to his office with a suitcase full of money and a
story of an activist who was railroaded straight to jail for
a double-cop-homicide, the time seemed right to fix a few
wrongs.
But the more Joe looked at his case and that of the
activist, the more he saw similarities he couldn’t ignore.
In solving one injustice, could he solve another? And was
it safer to trust a real demon, than to live with the demons
in his life?
Here’s the thing I love best about Walter Mosley novels: the
main characters are solid. You feel like you could
lean on them all day, and they’d never budge.
That’s Joe King Oliver, and that’s Down the River Unto
the Sea.
And yet, there’s wiggle room in this book: Mosley doesn’t
destroy readers’ fun by telling who done it in this noir
whodunit. Instead, we’re allowed the same dawning
realization that Mosley’s Joe has, and that just sharpens
the gasping you’ll do while reading. Add a swirl of
street-darkness, a few soulless characters and some clueless
ones, a bit of pure evil, and you’ll be turning pages far,
far into the night.
This is one of those books that leaves you a little
breathless – not only while you’re reading, but once the
back cover’s closed, too. For anyone who loves hard-bitten
PI thrillers, reading Down to the River Unto the Sea
couldn’t be more right. |
