Walter mosley book series8/31/2023 ![]() And when the two cases intersect, as they inevitably do in this genre, things get even more complicated. Propelled by his personal allegiances, Oliver pursues clues pertaining to Quiller and Tesserat through colorful parts of New York’s boroughs, New England hideouts and Southern no-tell motels. While Oliver has no lingering fondness for Monica, who refused to bail him out of Rikers years back, he takes the case because of his love for their teenage daughter, Aja-Denise, who works in his PI office and is his moral North Star. The bougie Black banker - who Oliver notes “still used the word Negro and was having an extramarital affair with at least one woman” - has been arrested in a heating oil scam and the couple’s assets frozen. One bad idea is compounded by another when Oliver agrees to help his ex-wife Monica’s current husband, Coleman Tesserat. He’d also like Oliver to investigate the detention of Alfred Quiller, a misogynistic racist and poster boy for alt-right groups. But Mosley’s nonagenarian is less interested in corporate intrigue than romancing Oliver’s 93-year-old grandmother, Brenda, in his Upper West Side mansion. The scenario is reminiscent of Sumner Redstone’s battle with daughter Shari over Viacom. Oliver’s innate understanding of the system is tested again in Mosley’s new book, “ Every Man a King,” which is set some five years after the conclusion of “Down the River.” Oliver is summoned by Roger Ferris, chairman of an $800-billion corporation, who’s being challenged for its control by his adult children. Luckily, he’s exonerated some three months later and spends the next decade rebuilding his life and livelihood through firsthand knowledge of how justice was “influenced by circumstance, character and, of course, wealth or lack of same.” One of the chief satisfactions in “ Down the River,” which won an Edgar (incredibly, Mosley’s first for an individual book), was watching the author orchestrate Oliver’s emotional destruction and transmutation in the infamously hellish Rikers from respected cop to a man capable of murder. But unlike Mosley’s other Black heroes, Oliver (named after the famed New Orleans jazz cornetist) was a senior-level detective until his double-crossing NYPD colleagues framed him for raping a white woman. ![]() It’s not that the author hasn’t from time to time located his fiction in the Big Apple - most recently in 2020’s “Trouble Is What I Do,” the sixth in the Leonid McGill series. In 2018’s “Down the River Unto the Sea,” New York City PI Joe King Oliver slid into the space occupied in many readers’ hearts by Walter Mosley’s iconic Los Angeles hero, Easy Rawlins. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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