Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Better wait for the movie, or hope for more incisive plotting in the promised sequel.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been.

Good dialogue and some tensely effective scenes-the air crackles whenever Easy goes up against a white man-don't add up to serious competition for Chandler or Wright. As Easy moves through his hazy, gritty postwar hell buying drinks and asking questions, the rest of the cast predictably begins to kill each other off and come after Easy, setting the stage for a climactic confrontation between Daphne and Easy-but Daphne's revelations aren't really worth the wait. Although he's the hero of a detective novel, Easy is no detective: his preferred method of investigation is to circulate among his friends-bartender Joppy (who recommends him for the job), boxer-bouncer Junior Fornay, philosophical Odell Jones, sultry Coretta James, and unpredictably violent Raymond (Mouse) Alexander-mentioning Daphne until he links her to hijacker Frank (Knifehand) Green, and then looking for Green with a deal offered by Todd Carter, the strait-laced white banker Daphne ran out on. Here, low-key black detective Easy Rawlins, fired from his job at a defense plant, agrees to locate femme fatale Daphne Monet for white gangster DeWitt Albright-and of course Finds more than he bargained for. Raymond Chandler meets Richard Wright in this not-quite-successful first novel set in 1948 L.A.

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley